Comrades in Service 



Margaret E. Burton 



CT 105 
.B85 



IN 




(xpigtaN?. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



EDITED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE 

MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 

OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 



COMRADES IN SERVICE 



N. B. — Special helps and denominational mission study litera- 
ture for this course can be obtained by corresponding 
with the Secretary of your mission board or society. 



COMRADES IN 
SERVICE 



BY 

MARGARET E. BURTON 



NEW YORK 
MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 
OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 

1915 






Copyright, 191 5, by 

Missionary Education Movement of the 

United States and Canada 



JUL -8 1915 



3GI.A401702 

Ms* i 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

PREFACE ix 

I A SERVANT OF THE CITY i 

Jacob A. Riis 

II A PILGRIM OF INDIA 25 

Chundra Lela 

III A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS .... 45 

J. A. Burns 

IV THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN . . 61 

Kaji Yajima 

V A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 79 

Dwight L. Moody 

VI A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 101 

Li Bi Cu 

VII A PACIFIC PIONEER 115 

Thomas Crosby 

VIII A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 131 

Samuel Adjai Crowther 

IX A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK ... 149 
Frances Jackson Coppin 

X AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS .... 165 
Syngman Rhee 

XI THE STORY OF A FRIEND 179 

Grace H. Dodge 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING 
PAGE 



Jacob A. Riis i S 

Chundra Lela 25 / 

Oh, Mother Ganges ! 28^ 

J. A. Burns 45 <•/ 

Alone in the Mountains 56V' 

Kaji Yajima 61 

Dwight L. Moody 79 

Round Top 98 

Li Bi Cu 101 

Thomas Crosby „ 115 

Samuel Adjai Crowther 131 

Frances Jackson Coppin 149 

Syngman Rhee 165 

Political Prisoners 172 

Greyston, Riverdale on the Hudson 184 



PREFACE 

" What are you going to do with the gift of life? " 
We to whom this gift is still a new and untried thing 
are standing eager-eyed before this challenging ques- 
tion. What are we going to do with it ? A few of us 
perhaps are replying, " I shall give my life to healing — 
or to teaching — or to farming — or to social service — or 
to business — or to the ministry — or to home-making. " 
Most of us, however, cannot yet answer so definitely. 
There are so many things which we must think about; 
the kind of ability we have; the opportunities of train- 
ing that are ours ; the claims other people have a right 
to make on us ; the needs and opportunities in different 
kinds of work; and like factors. It may be many 
months and years before most of us can say just 
exactly what we are going to do in the years to come. 
But is there not, after all, an answer to this question 
which all of us can make even now ? 

" What are you going to do with the gift of life? " 
The " Comrades in Service" of whom this book tells 
were very different from each other. They were of dif- 
ferent nations and different races; they lived in differ- 
ent lands and spoke different languages. Some of them 
were rich and some were desperately poor; some had 
every opportunity for education and some had almost 



x PREFACE 

none; some had social prominence r,nd some were 
slaves; some were born into beautiful Christian homes 
and some were taught to worship idols. But as you 
become acquainted with these comrade- folk I think 
that you will find that they were all alike in the answer 
they made to that ringing challenge, " What are you 
going to do with the gift of life? " 

I gratefully acknowledge my indebtedness to the 
publishers who permitted the use of material from The 
Making of an American, by Jacob A. Riis; An Indian 
Priestess, by Mrs. Lee; Chundra Lela, by Z. F. Griffin; 
The Black Bishop, by Jesse Page; The Life of Dwight 
L. Moody, by his son; Up and Down the North 
Pacific Coast, by Thomas Crosby; and Reminiscences 
of School Life and Teaching, by Mrs. Coppin. Heart- 
iest thanks are also due to many personal friends and 
acquaintances of these " Comrades in Service." Miss 
Ruth Davis, the Rev. George Heber Jones, Mr. Sher- 
wood Eddy, Miss Josephine Pinyon, and others have 
contributed much material without which several of 
these sketches would have been impossible. I am also 
deeply grateful to those subjects of sketches who are 
still living, who not only generously permitted me to 
write of them, but furnished me with information 
about themselves and their work. 

Margaret E. Burton. 

Chicago, Illinois, June 1, 1915. 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 



I have lived in the best of times, when you do not have to 
dream things good, but can make them so. 

— Jacob A. Riis. 




Copyright, J. E. Purdy 



JACOB A. RIIS 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 

Into the little tiled-roof house of a schoolmaster 
of the ancient town of Ribe, on the seacoast of Den- 
mark, there was born one day in 1849 a little boy 
who was named Jacob. His father wanted him to be- 
come a schoolmaster like himself, and one of this little 
Danish boy's earliest memories was of being led, pro- 
testing, through the crooked cobble-stoned streets of 
Ribe to the schoolhouse. He evidently failed to make 
a good initial impression on the schoolmistress, for 
a large portion of that first day in school was spent in 
an empty hogshead, in whose capacious depths he 
formed a deep and undying hatred of school and all 
that pertained thereto. 

Ribe was a wonderful place for boys. There was 
splendid fishing in the river and fine places along the 
forget-me-not- fringed banks where one could build 
fires and roast fish and potatoes. Once there had been 
a great castle in Ribe, and the moat around the green 
castle hill was now filled with long rippling reeds, grow- 
ing higher than a boy's head, and making a perfect jun- 
gle in which to hunt for tigers and grizzlies, and other 
wild beasts. Perhaps it was because he so loved the 
clean free sweep of meadow and ocean and river, and so 
gloried in the stories of the sturdy Norsemen of olden 



2 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

days, that Jacob Riis so hated the one tenement of 
Ribe, which rejoiced in the appropriate name of Rags 
Hall. Its crowded, dirty, spiritless atmosphere was such 
a contrast to all his boyish soul admired that, when 
he was about twelve years old, he took his Christ- 
mas gift of a shining silver " mark " (worth about 
twenty-five cents) and, holding it before the astonished 
eyes of the poorest and most " shiftless " householder 
of Rags Hall, announced that he would present it to 
him on condition that he would clean up his house 
and his children. 

When Jacob was fourteen years old, he decided that 
he had had enough of school and would like to learn 
to be a carpenter. His father consented that he should 
serve a year's apprenticeship to the best carpenter in 
Ribe, and then go to Copenhagen as an apprentice to 
a great builder. For four years Jacob worked in 
Copenhagen learning his trade, and then, having re- 
ceived his certificate as an enrolled carpenter of the 
guild of Copenhagen* went home to Ribe to ask Elisa- 
beth to be his wife. But Elisabeth said no, and with 
that answer all the light and laughter of life seemed 
blotted out for Jacob. He longed to go as far away 
from Denmark as possible and one May morning, with 
a curl of Elisabeth's hair in a locket around his neck, 
and only a little more than enough money for a steer- 
age passage to America in his pocket, he set forth to 
try to forget his troubles in the life of a far-away 
country. 

He landed in New York after a long and stormy 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 3 

passage, and four days after his arrival joined a gang 
of men who were being sent to work at Brady's Bend 
Iron Works on the Allegheny river. At Brady's 
Bend he was put to work building huts for the miners, 
and very vigorously he went about his task in the 
effort to forget the terrible homesickness which at- 
tacked him every time he looked at the wooded hills 
which rose up on every side and seemed to him like 
prison walls shutting him away from the meadows of 
Denmark. 

One July morning, when Jacob was working in the 
carpenter shop as usual, some one brought the startling 
news that France had declared war on Prussia, and 
that Denmark was expected to join forces with her^ 
old ally. Five minutes after the Danish boy had heard 
the news he was in the company's office, asking for 
his wages, and a few minutes later, having hurled his 
possessions into his trunk, he was running for the sta- 
tion, the trunk on his shoulder. The things which he 
had not been able to get into the trunk he sold for 
what he could get for them, and adding this sum to 
his wages was able to buy a ticket to Buffalo. He 
hoped that at Buffalo he would find Frenchmen who 
would be willing to help him get back to Europe to 
fight their enemy, but this was a vain hope, and he 
was forced to give his watch and his trunk and all its 
contents to a pawnbroker in order to get a ticket to 
New York. He reached New York with one cent in 
his pocket, but with high hopes of being sent at once 
to the front. There again, however, he was doomed to 



4 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

bitter disappointment. The Danish consul registered 
his request to be sent to Denmark in case of war, but 
could do no more. The French did not seem to be 
fitting out any volunteer army, and no one was paying 
the passage of fighting men back to Europe. Riis 
pawned his revolver and his top-boots to pay his 
boarding-house bill, and then, having no money, 
set out for the country with all that he had left, 
a linen duster and a pair of socks, in a gripsack over 
his shoulder. 

He walked till about daylight, then curled up in a 
wagon and went to sleep. It was an unfortunate 
place to select for a nap, for the wagon proved to 
be a milk cart, whose irate driver hauled the sleeper 
out by his feet and dumped him into the gutter before 
starting on his early morning rounds. About noon, 
footsore and faint with hunger, for he had had no 
food since the day before, Riis wandered aimlessly 
into the open gates of Fordham College. He sat down 
, to rest under a tree, so exhausted and famished that 
when a kindly monk asked him if he was hungry, he 
confessed that he was, although he says that he had 
no intention of making such an admission. The food 
gave him strength to go on and at night he found 
temporary work with a truck farmer. 

For several days Riis tramped through the country, 
doing odd jobs for his meals and sleeping in the fields 
at night, always trying to reach the sea in the hope 
of finding some way back to Denmark. Finally, his 
wanderings brought him back to New York where he 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 5 

pawned his boots for a dollar, fortified himself with 
a good dinner, and bought a ticket to Perth Amboy, 
New Jersey, with what was left. From Perth 
Amboy he walked for two days, sustained by two 
apples, and at sunset of the second day arrived at New 
Brunswick. He spent the night curled up on a brown- 
stone slab in the cemetery, and early the next morning 
was out looking for work. Finding nothing in New 
Brunswick, he went on to a town called " Little Wash- 
ington," where he succeeded in securing a job in a . 
brickyard. Here he stayed for six weeks, until one 
day he heard that a volunteer company was ready to 
sail for France. That night he started for New York, 
arriving there just after the company had sailed. Re- 
peated appeals to the French consul were unavailing, 
and a plea to the captain of a French man-of-war in 
the harbor was equally so. Finally, however, it seemed 
as if his persistent efforts were to be rewarded. He 
succeeded in getting a job as stoker on a steamer which 
was due to sail for France in an hour. He ran all 
the way to Battery Place for his valise, and all the • 
way back, arriving breathless just in time to see the 
steamer swing into the river beyond his reach. This 
was his last hope and he was again left penniless in 
New York. 

It was now late autumn, too late to get employment 
on farms or in brickyards. The city was full of idle 
men and Riis's repeated efforts to find something to 
do were fruitless. Day after day he walked the streets 
trying to find work, and to forget the terrible hunger 



6 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

which was his constant companion. Night after night 
he slept in the shelter of doorways or ash-bins, waked 
up time and again by the toe of a policeman's boot and 
told to " move on." But he says : " I was too proud in 
all my misery to beg. I do not believe I ever did. But 
I remember well a basement window at the downtown 
Delmonko's, the silent appearance of my ravenous 
face at which, at a certain hour in the evening, always 
evoked a generous supply of meat-bones and rolls from 
a white-capped cook who spoke French. That was the 
saving clause. I accepted his rolls as instalments of 
the debt his country owed me, or ought to owe me, for 
my unavailing efforts in its behalf." 

There was just one bright spot in Jacob Riis's life 
during these dark days, the devotion of an adoring 
little black-and-tan, who had shared a doorway with 
him one cold night and had been the loyal companion 
of his miseries ever after. One terrible night of storm, 
Riis, drenched to the skin and unutterably wretched and 
hungry, with no prospect of shelter or food, was almost 
overcome by discouragement. Home and Elisabeth 
seemed hopelessly far away and unattainable and the 
dark river terribly near. Then the little dog pressed 
close against him for sympathy and banished the dread- 
ful sense of desolation. Taking him up in his arms, 
Riis tramped through the torrents of rain to the police 
station and applied for shelter. The sergeant saw the 
drenched little dog under the tatters of Riis's ragged 
coat, and ordered him to put it outside. There was 
nothing else to do — to stay in the streets through such a 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 7 

night was to perish — and most reluctantly Riis left his 
little friend curled up in a ball on the steps, waiting 
for him. 

The police station was terribly crowded with the 
worst type of tramps, but Riis was utterly exhausted 
and soon fell asleep. He woke up long before morn- 
ing, put his hand to his throat, and found that some 
one had cut the string around his neck and stolen the 
gold locket in which he had kept the little shining curl 
which he felt to be his last link with home. Heart- 
broken, he rushed to the sergeant with his story, only 
to be called a thief, accused of having stolen the 
locket, and threatened with imprisonment. It was too 
much, coming after days and nights of suffering, and 
all the bitterness in his heart poured itself out in angry 
words. He never remembered what he said, but he 
remembered that the sergeant ordered the doorman 
to put him out, and that the little dog, seeing the door- 
man lay unfriendly hands upon his beloved friend, 
sprang at him and buried his teeth in his leg. The 
doorman caught the little beast by its legs and beat out 
its brains against the stone steps, and Jacob Riis, mad 
with such rage as he had never before imagined, 
snatched up paving-stones from the gutter and hurled 
them at the police station until the frightened ser- 
geant ordered two policemen to disarm him and take 
him out of the district. They left him at the nearest 
ferry, and he gave the ferryman his silk handkerchief 
to take him to Jersey City. For four days he walked 
along the railroad tracks, living on apples and an occa- 



8 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

sional meal earned by odd jobs, and sleeping in empty 
barns at night. When he reached Philadelphia he 
found friends in need, in the Danish consul and his 
wife, who gave him a two weeks' rest in their home 
and then sent him to friends in Jamestown. 

The following winter Riis spent in Dexterville, not 
far from Jamestown, felling trees and trapping musk- 
rats. It was during this winter that he first made his 
appearance upon the lecture platform. There was a so- 
ciety of Scandinavian workingmen in Jamestown who 
had had little opportunity for education, to whom Riis 
undertook to lecture twice a week on astronomy and 
geology. For several weeks he held his audience spell- 
bound by his learned discourses on the formation and 
development of the earth, illustrated freely with im- 
promptu drawings of saurians, the ichthyosauri, and 
other prehistoric beasts. But when he attempted to 
explain latitude and longitude, his audience lost confi- 
dence in him. After he had struggled for some time to 
make the matter clear, an old sea-captain arose in the 
body of the house and declared that a man who could 
* not explain so simple a thing as that evidently knew 
nothing whatever. The audience at once took the old 
captain's word for it and departed in a body, convinced 
that none of the amazing tales which they had been 
hearing were worthy of credence on the part of sensible 
men. 

In the spring Riis walked from Dexterville to West- 
field, and in Westfield worked for a doctor for a 
month, earning enough money to take the train to Buf- 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 9 

falo and begin life there with a few extra dollars in his 
pocket. At Buffalo he worked for a time in a lumber- 
yard, but lost his position before long by taking the 
part of some newly arrived German laborers who were 
being abused by a tyrannical foreman. He then went 
to work in a cabinet factory. It was while working in 
this factory that he first tried his hand at teaching. 
One of his fellow workmen was an elderly Dane, who 
had worked so hard in childhood that he had never 
had time for the rudiments of education. Riis under- 
took to make up this lack, and night after night the 
older man came to Riis's little bedroom and by the 
light of the little lamp soon learned to read and write 
the language of his adopted country. 

After several months of varied experiences in Buf- 
falo Riis accepted an invitation to be a traveling sales- 
man for a firm of his countrymen who had started a 
cooperative furniture factory in Jamestown. His 
efforts in this line were successful enough to encourage 
him to become an agent for a " patent flat and fluting 
iron/' in the interests of which he canvassed several 
of the states of the Union, until a fever laid him low 
in Franklin, Pennsylvania. When at last he was well 
enough to travel, he started for New York, walking all 
the way and earning just enough by the sale of his 
irons to pay for food and lodging. It was spring when 
he started from Franklin, but the leaves along the Hud- 
son were aflame with gold and scarlet before he finally 
reached New York. 

He spent his last twenty dollars for a course in 



io COMRADES IN SERVICE 

telegraphy at a business college in New York, and 
then answered an advertisement for a " city editor " in 
a Long Island weekly paper. He rilled this position 
for two weeks, and having by that time received con- 
clusive proof that the editor was exceedingly " bad 
pay," went back to New York no richer than when he 
had come except for Bob, a Newfoundland puppy which 
some one had given him. 

His next occupation was the peddling of an illus- 
trated edition of Hard Times. Long afterward he 
declared that no amount of good fortune could ever 
turn his head as long as that book stood on his 
shelves. He and Bob were a living illustration of 
" hard times/' for they were earning barely enough 
to keep them alive. Bob fared better than his master, 
for he was able to coax many a meal from the kitchen 
doors of the houses they visited, but Riis was almost 
always hungry. Things went from bad to worse. 
One day the two had only a crust to eat between them, 
and the next morning set out faint with hunger, with- 
out a cent for food for the day or shelter at night. 
All day long they went from house to house without 
making a single sale. Bob's most persuasive tail- 
waggings and his master's most eloquent praises of 
Dickens had failed to provide breakfast, dinner, sup- 
per, or money for a night's lodging. Without a cent 
in his pocket Jacob Riis sank down at night on the 
steps of Cooper Institute utterly exhausted and dis- 
couraged. His dismal reflections were suddenly inter- 
rupted by the question, " Why, what are you doing 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY ir 

here ? " and looking up he saw the principal of the busi- 
ness college which he had attended when he first came 
back to New York. " Books ! " snorted this gentleman 
in response to Riis's answer, " I guess they won't 
make you rich. Now, how would you like to be a re- 
porter, if you have got nothing better to do? The 
manager of a news agency downtown asked me to-day 
to find him a bright young fellow whom he could 
break in. It isn't much — ten dollars a week to start 
with. But it is better than peddling books, I know. 
. . . Hard Times. ... I guess so. What do you say ? 
I think you will do. Better come along and let me 
give you a note to him now." 

To be a reporter had been Riis's dream for many a 
month, and he could hardly believe that such an op- 
portunity had really come to him. All through the 
night he and Bob walked up and down Broadway, 
thinking. " What had happened had stirred me pro- 
foundly," he wrote many years later. " For the sec- 
ond time I saw a hand held out to save me from wreck 
just when it seemed inevitable, and I knew it for his 
hand to whose will I was at last beginning to bow in 
humility that had been a stranger to me before. It 
had ever been my own will, my own way, upon which 
I insisted. In the shadow of Grace Church I bowed 
my head against the granite wall of the gray tower, 
and prayed for strength to do the work which I had 
so long and arduously sought and which had now come 
to me; the while Bob sat and looked on, saying clearly 
enough with his wagging tail that he did not know 



12 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

what was going on, but that he was sure it was all 
right." 

The next morning Jacob Riis presented himself for 
duty at the New York News Association, and was 
assigned to report a luncheon in the Astor House. 
In the midst of such savory food as he had not seen 
or smelled in many a day, he wrote his report, and 
won from the editor a brief, " You'll do! Take that 
desk and report at ten every morning sharp." Then, 
having had no food for three days, he fell in a swoon 
on his way up the stairs of a Danish boarding-house, 
and lay there until some one stumbled against him in 
the dark and carried him in. 

All through the autumn and winter Riis worked with 
the news agency, beginning his day promptly at ten 
in the morning and seldom reaching home until one 
or two in the morning of the next day. In the 
spring a group of politicians in Brooklyn, who had 
started a weekly newspaper, asked him to be their 
reporter, and two weeks after he had joined them made 
him editor of the paper. When the paper had served 
its purpose by helping its owners to win in the fall 
elections, they decided to give it up, but at Riis's 
earnest entreaty finally consented to sell it to him for 
the small sum which he could pay down, and his notes 
for future payments. For the next year Riis was edi- 
tor, reporter, publisher, and advertising agent of a 
big four-page weekly, and by an almost incredible 
amount of work became its sole owner by June. The 
day on which he made his last payment was Elisabeth's 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 13 

birthday, and that night he sent a letter addressed to 
her speeding on its way to Denmark. 

It was while he was editing the News that he be- 
came powerfully stirred by the preaching of the Rev. 
Ichabod Simmons, and definitely consecrated him- 
self to the service of God and his fellows. With 
characteristic whole-heartedness he decided to give up 
his editorial work and become a minister, but was re- 
strained by Mr. Simmons, who showed him that the 
world had need of " consecrated pens " as well as con- 
secrated tongues. " Then and there I consecrated 
mine/' says Mr. Riis. The News was promptly dedi- 
cated to the cause of reform, regardless of the conse- 
quent unpopularity of its owner. 

Into the midst of these busy days, there came one 
early winter afternoon a letter half covered with for- 
eign stamps. Elisabeth did not know how many stamps 
it took to carry a letter from Denmark to America, 
and because she was afraid to ask anybody about it, 
she put on three times as many as were required. 
When he had taken the letter up to his own little 
room and finally summoned the courage to read it, the 
face of the world changed for Jacob Riis. " I knelt 
down," he says, " and prayed long and fervently that 
I might strive with all my might to deserve the great 
happiness that had come to me." The doctor had 
ordered a rest and change, the newspaper could be 
sold for five times what had been paid for it, and there 
was nothing to prevent the prospective bridegroom 
from going home to claim Elisabeth almost immedi- 



14 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

ately. In a very few weeks in the old Domkirke of 
Ribe he and the Elisabeth of his dreams were made 
man and wife. 

Soon after Jacob Riis returned to America with 
his wife he was offered a position as reporter on the 
New York Tribune. For six months he worked hard 
for a salary so small that he was forced to draw on 
his little bank account to make both ends meet. Then 
one night when he had been uptown on a late assign- 
ment, and was running at full speed through a blinding 
snowstorm to get his report in before the paper went 
to press, he collided with the city editor of the Tribune 
so violently as to throw him off his feet into a snow- 
drift. The irate remarks which issued from the drift 
convinced Riis that his days with the Tribune were 
numbered, and he waited in despair for the victim's 
recognition of his assailant. But the city editor's 
curiosity as to the cause of Riis's mad haste seemed 
more pronounced than his wrath. " Do you always 
run like that when you are out on assignments? " he 
inquired, after listening to Riis's explanation. " When 
it is late like this — yes," Riis answered. " How else 
would I get my copy in?" "Well," was the editor's 
comment, " just take a reef when you round the 
corner. Don't run your city editor down again." 

The next morning Riis went to the office with a 
sinking heart. He had not been there long before he 
was summoned to the city editor's desk, and the first 
words he heard seemed to confirm his worst fore- 
bodings. 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 15 

" Mr. Riis," the editor began stiffly, " you knocked 
me down last night without cause." 

" Yes, sir ! But I -" Riis interrupted. 

" Into a snowdrift," the editor continued. " Nice 
thing for a reporter to do to his commanding officer. 
Now, sir! this will not do. We must find some way 
of preventing it in the future. Our man at Police 
Headquarters has left. I am going to send you up 
there in his place. You can run there all you want 
to, and you will want to all you can. It is a place that 
needs a man who will run to get his copy in and tell 
the truth and stick to it. You will find plenty of 
fighting there. But don't go knocking people down — 
unless you have to." 

Riis went out from the editor's office and did two 
things. He telegraphed his wife, " Got staff appoint- 
ment. Police Headquarters. $25 a week. Hur- 
rah." And facing what he knew to be the most diffi- 
cult position on the paper, remembering how hard had 
been the fight his predecessor had had to wage, he com- 
mended his work and himself to the God who gives 
victory, and took hold ! Both actions were characteris- 
tic. Prayer in the midst of his tasks was as natural 
to Riis as breathing, for he regarded his work as a 
reporter as a God-given opportunity. 

u The reporter who is behind the scenes," he once 
said, " sees the tumult of passions, and not rarely a 
human heroism that redeems all the rest. It is his task 
so to portray it that we can see all its meaning, or at 
all events catch the human drift of it, not merely the 



16 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

foulness and the reek of blood. If he can do that 
he has performed a signal service, and his murder story- 
may easily come to speak more eloquently to the 
minds of thousands than the sermon preached to a 
hundred in the church on Sunday." 

With such a conception as this of the opportunity 
of his work, prayer in the midst of it all was inevitable. 
" My supplications," he said, " ordinarily take the 
form of putting the case plainly to him who is the 
source of all right and justice, and leaving it so." 

The first years of work at the Mulberry Street 
police quarters were years of constant fight for Jacob 
Riis. " Somebody was always fighting somebody else 
for some fancied injury or act of bad faith in the gath- 
ering of the news," he says, and upon the arrival of 
the new reporter from the Tribune all made common 
cause against him. The record of his working hours 
tells of ceaseless strenuous struggle to get for his paper 
the news which rival reporters and the police were 
determined he should not get. But the greatest fight 
of all those fighting years, says Jacob Riis, was with 
himself. His blood had never ceased to boil at the 
memory of that night of pouring rain when at the 
door of the police station his loyal little dog friend had 
been killed before his eyes. And now that he had a 
recognized place at the police headquarters, and the 
backing of the Tribune, nothing would have been easier 
than to go to the records of the Church Street Police 
Station, find out the name of the cruel sergeant and de- 
mand his punishment. Time after time he went to the 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 17 

station to begin his search in the record books, and 
again and again he turned away, until one day, as he 
held in his hand the very book which would have given 
him the sergeant's name, he thought of a plan of re- 
venge which his heart could approve. He would 
destroy, not the sergeant, but the system of police 
lodging-houses of which the sergeant had been only •' 
an instrument. With the record book in his hands, he 
vowed that if God gave him strength he would fight the 
unutterably filthy police lodging-houses, where hard- 
ened tramps and impressionable penniless boys, such 
as he had been, were herded together in utter wretched- 
ness, until not a lodging-house was left. He set the 
book down unopened, his fight with himself over, his 
long fight with those breeders of physical and moral 
disease begun. 

It was a long fight and a slow one, and many a time 
Jacob Riis kept up his courage only by going out and 
watching a stone-cutter hammer away at his stone one 
hundred times without so much as a crack appearing, 
until finally at the one hundred and first blow the rock 
would split in two. Riis never lost a chance to strike 
a blow. He felt sure that if the people of New York 
understood the evils of the police lodging-houses they 
would never tolerate them, and he told the truth in 
no uncertain terms through the columns of newspaper 
after newspaper, by pictures, by lantern slides, by re- 
ports to committees and boards, until finally, more than 
fourteen years after the fight was started, when Mr. 
Roosevelt was commissioner of police, the doors of the 



18 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

police lodging-rooms were closed forever, and the 
murder of the little dog was avenged ! 

Another fight of the first years as police reporter on 
the Tribune was with Mulberry Bend, a slum district 
filled with tenements far more congested and dan- 
gerous than the Rags Hall which had so displeased 
the twelve-year-old schoolboy. Mulberry Bend was a 
center of both disease and crime, and Jacob Riis at- 
tacked it single-handed. Article after article he wrote, 
making apparently little or no impression, but never 
giving up. Then one day his morning newspaper 
contained a four-line item telling of the discovery of 
a method of taking pictures by flashlight. Riis was 
sure that if he could make people see the Bend at night 
as he had seen it, he could rouse them to action, and 
straightway investigated the matter of flashlights. 
Within two weeks he was invading Mulberry Bend 
night after night, armed with flashlight cartridges, 
which in those days were shot from a revolver, and 
which were more than terrifying to the startled in- 
habitants of the Bend. Little by little Riis won his 
fight, and was rewarded for the long hours of volun- 
tary night work, on top of busy days, by seeing the 
tenement-houses of the Bend condemned by the Sani- 
tary Board, and a park and playground established 
on the place where they had been. 

The fight for the destruction of Mulberry Bend was 
only the beginning of Jacob Riis' fight with the slum 
and the tenement-house, which lasted as long as life 
lasted. Day after day he put the facts before the 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 19 

people of New York City through the columns of his 
newspaper. Many a night found him in church or 
lecture hall showing the stereoptican slides which he 
had had made from his photographs, that both the eyes 
and ears of the people of that great city might know 
" how the other half lives." One night an editor of 
Scribner's Magazine heard him lecture and asked him to 
write an article for the magazine. When the magazine 
article came out, a firm of publishers asked him to 
elaborate it into a book, and night after night he came 
home from his office and wrote How the Other Half 
Lives, while the rest of the family slept. How desper- 
ately tired he grew probably no one knows but himself, 
and even he hardly realized it until one evening in 
Boston, he went to call on a friend and found, when 
he tried to give the maid his name, that he had no idea 
what it was. But he felt repaid for all the hard work 
when his book came out and thousands of people all 
over the country were reading How the Other Half 
Lives and learning how to help. This was the first of 
many books which Jacob Riis wrote to tell the story of 
the needs of the poor and the way to meet those 
needs. Children of the Tenements, The Battle with 
the Slums, Out of Mulberry Street are only a few of 
them. 

Always, too, he was helping in other ways. One 
year he gave all the time and effort he could spare as 
general agent of the Council of Confederated Good 
Government Clubs. 

" We tore down unfit tenements, forced the opening 



20 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

of parks and playgrounds, the establishment of a 
truant school system, the demolition of the over- 
crowded old Tombs and the erection on its site of 
a decent new prison. We overhauled the civil courts 
and made them over new in the charter of the Greater 
New York. We lighted dark halls; closed the 
' cruller ' bakeries in tenement-house cellars that had 
caused the loss of no end of lives, for the crullers 
were boiled in fat in the early morning hours while 
the tenants slept, and when the fat was spilled in the 
fire their peril was awful. We fought the cable-car 
managers at home and the opponents of a truant school 
at Albany. We backed up Roosevelt in his fight in 
the Police Board and — well, I shall never get time to 
tell it all. But it was a great year ! " he summarizes. 
This might be a summary not simply of that one year's 
work, but of all the later years of his life, for the 
destruction of the tenements and the establishment 
of an adequate number of good public schools, truant 
schools, and playgrounds, were causes to which he gave 
his strength without reserve. 

Jacob Riis was not the kind of man to care greatly 
for recognition of his work. It was enough for him 
that the work was done. A great many honors of dif- 
ferent kinds came to him, many of them nominations 
to honorary membership in various societies in Amer- 
ica and Europe. Most of them he declined, stuffing 
the letters which offered them into a pigeonhole labeled 
tersely with one of Eugene Field's verses, descriptive 
of " Clow's Noble Yellow Pup " : 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 21 

"'Him all that goodly company 
Did as deliverer hail; 
They tied a ribbon round his neck, 
Another round his tail." 

There was one honor, however, which he could not 
refuse, fragrant as it was, with memories of flowers 
and fields and little children. When the meadows 
around his house in Richmond Hill were radiant with 
the gold and white of buttercups and daisies, and 
sweet with the scent of clover blossoms, his small sons 
and daughters used to bring him great armfuls of blos- 
soms and beg him to take them to " the poors " in the 
hot city. But no matter how laden he was when he 
started from home, he never had a single flower five 
minutes after he had left the ferry, for wistful little 
faces sprang up on every side, wild with eagerness for 
just one of the joy-bringing blossoms. The sight of 
those for whom there were no posies left, who sat 
down on the curbstone and dug grimy fists into eyes 
brimming over with tears, went straight to the heart 
of Jacob Riis, and one June morning he published an 
appeal for flowers in the newspapers, offering to dis- 
pose of any that were sent to his office. 

" Flowers came pouring in from every corner of the 
compass. They came in boxes, in barrels, and in 
bunches, from field and garden, from town and coun- 
try. Express wagons carrying flowers jammed Mul- 
berry Street and the police came out to marvel at the 
row. The office was fairly smothered in fragrance. 
A howling mob of children besieged it. The reporters 



22 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

forgot their rivalry and lent a hand with enthusiasm 
in giving out the flowers. The Superintendent of 
Police detailed five stout patrolmen to help carry 
the abundance to points of convenient distribution. 
Wherever he went, fretful babies stopped crying and 
smiled as the messengers of love were laid against their 
wan cheeks. Slovenly women curtsied and made way. 
. . . The Italians in the Barracks stopped quarreling 
to help keep order. The worst street became suddenly 
good and neighborly." 

The slum's hungry love for the beautiful was a 
revelation even to Jacob Riis. Taking flowers there 
was, he said, " like cutting windows for souls." Al- 
though he saw that the ministry of the flowers had 
assumed proportions far beyond his ability to handle, 
he knew that somehow, somewhere, the work must be 
taken care of, for the slums must not starve for want of 
the fragrance and joyous color which willing hands 
were ready to pour in so lavishly. Some of the boxes 
of flowers had the initials I. H. N. on them, and when 
Jacob Riis learned that they stood for " In His Name," 
the words which were the motto of the King's Daugh- 
ters' Society, he thought he knew to whom to entrust 
the flowers. The members of the society gladly under- 
took the work, but the needs they saw as they took the 
flowers from house to house were too great and com- 
pelling to allow them to turn away when summer and 
flowers had gone, and to-day there stands in Henry 
Street a beautiful settlement house maintained by the 
King's Daughters' Society. What wonder that when 



A SERVANT OF THE CITY 23 

on Jacob Riis's silver wedding day they asked him to 
let this settlement house bear his name, he could not say 
them nay. 

" I have lived in the best of times,'' said Jacob Riis, 
" when you do not have to dream things good, but can 
make them so." Probably no one has ever known bet- 
ter than he what joy it is to " make them so," nor could 
say more heartily than he, when working days were 
nearing their close, " I have been very happy. No 
man ever had so good a time." 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 



All this I endured just to find God. 

— Chundra Lela. 



-'"4: >•■•■ 




CHUNDRA LELA 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 

About eighty years ago, in the city of Kaski, up on 
the northern border of India, among the Himalaya 
mountains, a great celebration was taking place. 
There was a long procession of gaily decorated ele- 
phants, and a sumptuous feast, lasting several days, 
to which people came from all over the state of Nepal, 
in which Kaski is located. All this was because a 
little girl, seven years old, the daughter of a prominent 
Brahman priest of Kaski, was being married to the 
son of another wealthy Brahman. Because she was 
such a little girl, it was decided that she should not at 
once go to her husband's home, but continue to live in 
her father's house. And because her father was a very 
learned man, and had plenty of leisure time, he taught 
little Chundra Lela to read and write, although it was 
not then the custom in India to give girls any education 
whatever. 

But one day, when Chundra Lela was nine years 
old, word came to her home which caused lamenta- 
tions as great as the happiness which her wedding had 
brought two years before. For her husband was 
dead and she was a widow, the most despised of all 
creatures in India. Hinduism teaches that the death 
of a husband is caused by some sin which his wife 

25 



26 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

has committed, perhaps in some previous existence, 
and as long as she lives she is an outcast, scorned and 
ill treated by every one. For the first year after her 
husband's death she is allowed to have only one meal 
a day, and twice a month she must fast for an entire 
day and night without even a drop of water, although 
the heat of India is terrible. Her hair, which is the 
pride of a woman of India, is cut off and her head is 
shaved; she may wear only the coarsest clothing and 
no ornaments; and is never allowed to go to any 
celebrations or appear at any social gatherings, be- 
cause her presence is supposed to bring bad luck. 
She is never allowed to marry again, but all her life 
is wholly at the mercy of other people, being often the 
drudge and slave of her husband's family. Because 
little girls are married so early in India, and because a 
child is considered a widow if the man or boy to whom 
she is betrothed dies even if she is not yet married, 
one woman in every six in that great country is a 
widow. There are 1 12,000 widows less than ten years 
old, and 18,000 less than five. It was a great host into 
whose membership nine-year-old Chundra Lela entered. 
When she was twelve years old her father took 
her with him on a pilgrimage to the sacred shrine of 
Juggernaut, many hundreds of miles away in the east- 
ern part of India. The hardships of so long a jour- 
ney in a climate like that of India are very great, 
and were much greater at that time than now, for 
there were no trains to carry the pilgrims, and the 
long miles must be covered on foot or in the bullock 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 27 

carts or in palanquins. Hundreds of pilgrims died 
every year as a result of the difficulties of the journey, 
and Chundra Lela's father was among those who never 
returned to his home. Just before he died he called 
his daughter to him and gave her a bunch of keys. He 
told her that if, when she reached home, she would 
open the boxes to which they belonged, she would find 
the gold which she had inherited from her husband. 

During the next year Chundra Lela spent much 
time in studying the sacred books which her father 
had taught her to read, and at the end of the year 
she had arrived at a momentous decision. 

" In my study of the sacred books of the Hindus," 
she says, " and especially Bhagavad Git a, I had 
found that salvation is promised to those who visit 
and worship at all the holy places, and if one would 
pay careful attention to all such matters he would get 
a vision of God in this world. I decided that a vision 
of God and forgiveness of sins would be worth more 
to me than anything else." 

Accordingly this little girl, barely fourteen years 
old, decided that she would go on a pilgrimage to the 
four greatest Hindu shrines, one at the extreme east 
of India, one at the western boundary, one far in the 
south, and another as far to the north in the heights of 
the Himalaya mountains. To visit these four shrines 
meant a journey covering a distance as great as that 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean and back again, 
and as Chundra Lela must walk almost all the way, 
it would take her many years to do this. But her 



28 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

heart yearned for the assurance that she had re- 
ceived forgiveness for the unknown sin which she 
supposed had caused her husband's death, and for 
the promised vision of God; and she counted no 
difficulties or hardships too great a cost to pay to 
secure these blessings. 

Chundra Lela was sure that if her brothers or her 
stepmother knew what she was planning to do they 
would not permit her to go, so she did not tell any 
one of her plans, except two other widows in the 
household who had for a long time been thinking of 
going on this pilgrimage but had not been able to do 
so for lack of money. They gladly agreed to go with 
Chundra Lela, and at three o'clock one morning, be- 
fore any one else was astir, the three stole out of 
the house, each with a long narrow bag around her 
waist, filled with the gold coins which Chundra Lela 
had found in the boxes to which her father had given 
her the keys. 

As they traveled, Chundra Lela counted her sacred 
beads over and over, and repeated incantation after 
incantation which she had learned from the sacred 
books. At every sacred river she stopped and bathed, 
in the hope of washing away her sins, and she wor- 
shiped at each shrine she passed, making offerings be- 
fore the idols and giving presents to the priests. At 
Monghyr, where there is a shrine to the goddess Sita, 
it is a part of the worship to pour very hot water 
over the unprotected body, and this Chundra Lela did, 
unflinchingly. At Calcutta she bathed in the sacred 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 29 

river Ganges, and at Gaya, where there are forty-five 
holy places, she visited them all, giving a present to 
the priest in charge of each of them. And finally she 
and her companions reached the great temple of Jug- 
gernaut at Puri, on the eastern border of India. 

This temple is one of the most magnificent in India, 
and the ground for eighty miles around is called 
holy. In this temple is one of the ugliest of all the 
315,000,000 gods of Hinduism, Juggernaut. He has 
only a stump of a body, no legs, only parts of arms, 
and huge head, eyes, and mouth. Hosts of pilgrims 
from all over India try to be in Puri at the time of 
the annual Juggernaut festival, but many of them die 
of starvation and hardship on the journey. At the 
time of the festival the idol is taken out of the temple 
and put in an enormous car, built in the form of a 
tower, to which are attached immense ropes, very 
long and heavy. Hundreds, even thousands of people 
take hold of the ropes and pull the car through the 
streets, though it is so heavy that it sometimes takes 
hours to get it started. Every pilgrim tries frantically 
to get hold of a rope, and those who cannot often 
throw themselves in front of the car, or prostrate 
themselves in the mud beside it in their religious 
frenzy. 

Here Chundra Lela spent two weeks, performing 
all the sacred rites of worship, and giving generously 
to the temple and the priests. But she did not receive 
the vision of God for which she had prayed, nor did 
her earnest worship of the ugly idol bring her a sense 



30 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

of pardon. So she and her companions set forth again, 
to walk the thousand long, hot miles which lay between 
them and the great shrine of southern India, on the 
island of Ramesvaram, not far from Ceylon. The god 
worshiped in this temple is Ram, one of the favorite 
gods of Hinduism, the story of whose adventurous 
and exciting life is told in the Ramayana, one of the 
sacred books of the Hindus. Months had lengthened 
into years before Chundra Lela and her companions 
arrived at Ramesvaram, but they finally reached the 
temple and spent ten days in worship there. Here 
again, as at Juggernaut, Chundra Lela gave a great 
feast to the priests, and presented them with a cow to 
supply them with milk. But here again she found no 
peace, and she and her friends set out for another jour- 
ney of a thousand miles to Dwaraca, the great temple 
at the extreme west of India. 

The Hindus believe that the temple here was raised 
by a miracle in a single night. It is sacred to the god 
Krishna, the story of whose impure and vicious deeds 
is not fit to be read. But millions of pilgrims visit 
this temple, for it is written of it, " Whoever visits 
that holy shrine, the place where Krishna pursued his 
sports, is liberated from all sin." Here Chundra Lela 
spent fifteen days, painting her body with sandalwood, 
worshiping the idol, and giving lavish gifts to the 
priests and holy men. 

The next stage of her journey was perhaps the 
hardest of all, for the fourth great temple is on Mount 
Badrinath, one of the great mountains of the Himalaya 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 31 

range. The temple is 10,400 feet above sea-level, and 
before the feet of the pilgrims have gone far up the 
mountain path they are numb with cold and cut by 
jagged ice. Chundra Lela and her companions 
wrapped their bleeding feet in layer after layer of cloth, 
and went on determinedly, though they were soon 
suffering intensely with the cold. The last part of the 
way lies along so steep and dangerous a path that the 
climb was made only by clinging to rocks and ice, and 
these weary pilgrims seemed almost more dead than 
alive when at last they reached the temple. But their 
hearts were hopeful, for this was the end of their 
pilgrimage, and surely they would now receive the 
promised assurance of forgiveness, surely they would 
find the God for whom they had so long and so ear- 
nestly sought ! Three days they stayed in the intense 
cold, and then began the hard journey down the moun- 
tain. Chundra Lela's heart was very heavy, for the 
four shrines had all been visited, and the peace and 
sense of fellowship with God, to gain which she had 
left her home seven years before, had not come. 

But she refused to give up. Weary and exhausted 
though she was she climbed Mount Kedarnath, another 
mountain of the Himalayas, on which there is a noted 
temple, and sprinkled the idol with water from the 
sacred Ganges river, which she had brought with her. 
She bathed in the Ganges where it comes out from 
the mountainside at Hardwar, and again at Allahabad, 
where it joins another sacred river, the Jumna. She 
cast her gift of flowers upon it at Benares, and made 



32 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

offerings at the many shrines in that sacred city, and 
gave generous gifts to the priests at Ranigung, the place 
celebrated as the birthplace of the god Ram. On her 
way to Ranigung one of her companions developed a 
fever, and in spite of all that was done for her died 
within three days. At Ranigung the other was smitten 
with cholera and died. Then Chundra Lela's heart 
was heavy indeed. She says: 

" I had visited the four great places sacred to the 
Hindus, a great many of the smaller places, and had 
expended much money, but all in vain. I had received 
no manifestation nor any evidence that the Supreme 
Being, or any lesser god, was pleased with my worship. 
My two faithful friends were gone, and I was alone 
in the world. ... In my distress I knew not what 
to do." 

While she was wondering where to go next, she 
met a company of pilgrims on their way to the tem- 
ple of Juggernaut. Being alone and having no plan, 
she decided to go with them, although they warned 
her that their path lay through a thick forest, and they 
must experience much suffering before arriving at 
their destination. Chundra Lela, however, decided to 
cast in her lot with theirs. Now that her two com- 
panions were gone, she did her own cooking and car- 
ried her water for the first time in her life. The com- 
pany of pilgrims received many gifts of food from 
the people of the villages through which they passed, 
but Chundra Lela was too independent to accept any 
of these gifts, although she had made so many offer- 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 33 

ings before the idols and to the priests and had sup- 
ported herself and her companions for so many years 
that her supply of gold pieces was almost gone. One 
day, when the company of pilgrims was resting not 
far from Midnapur, the king, whose palace was near, 
sent his servants with gifts of food for them. Chun- 
dra Lela declined these gifts, to the astonishment of 
the servant, who told the king on his return that all had 
accepted the rice and ghee (melted butter), except one 
woman who sat reading her sacred books. The king 
was interested in this account of a woman who could 
read the sacred books, and sent for her to come to 
his palace. Chundra Lela accepted this invitation, 
and was graciously received by the queen and her 
maids of honor. When they asked her where she 
had come from and why she had declined to eat the 
food the king had sent, she answered: 

" My home is in Nepal, and my father was the 
family priest to the king of Nepal. I pay my own way 
and buy my own food." When they asked why she 
had come so far from her home, she told them : 

" I am trying to find God, and deliverance from 
sin. 

The king and queen begged her to remain with them 
as their priestess, and she consented to do so, giving 
her time for the next few years to teaching Sanskrit 
to the women of the palace and reading the sacred 
books to them. The king built a house for her, gave 
her servants of her own, and showered every kind- 
ness upon her. But she was restless, for she had not 



34 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

yet satisfied the longing of her heart, and after a few 
years of quiet she set out on her journeying again. 
Not long after she had left the palace she met a woman 
who was an ascetic or fakir, who offered to teach her 
how to torture herself in such ways as to please the 
gods. 

" I thought in my mind," says Chundra Lela, " that 
if there was any virtue in these rites, surely I would 
find God." 

The story of the tortures she inflicted upon herself 
during the next years would be hard to believe if there 
were not many such stories of devout men and 
women of India who have sought by the most terrible 
bodily suffering to win the favor of the gods. A mis- 
sionary tells of one place in which many of these 
fakirs were gathered together. 

" Each selected his own mode of penance, or self- 
torture," she writes. " Some were lying on beds of 
spikes; others buried in the sand; still others lying 
over smoking wood; some had held their arms in an 
upright position until the flesh had withered and dried 
on the bone, and the unkempt finger-nails had grown 
several inches in length, piercing through the flesh and 
winding about the shriveled and distorted hand." 

Chundra Lela vowed that all during the six most 
scorchingly hot months of India's hot year, she would 
sit all day and every day in the burning sun, with five 
fires built close around her. From midnight until 
daylight each night she stood in front of an idol, 
standing on one foot, with the other drawn up against 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 35 

it, imploring the god to reveal himself to her. In the 
cooler months, instead of this, she spent the night 
sitting in a pond of water, up to her neck, counting 
over her sacred beads. Years afterward she told a 
friend : 

" Nobody knows how long those nights were, nor 
how I suffered before morning. The string contained 
one hundred and eight beads. With each bead I called 
on the name of a god; with the other hand I kept 
account of the number of times I had gone around the 
string. . . . In a night I would go round the string 
one thousand times, repeating the name of the gods one 
hundred and eight thousand times. I would look 
toward the East for the first ray of light, and wonder 
if the night would ever end. When day broke I would 
crawl out of the water as best I could with my be- 
numbed limbs, and prostrating my body on the 
ground, would then measure my length to the spot 
where I was to sit all day, worshiping idols. . . . 
Thus I called upon Ram day and night, with no re- 
sponse. All this I endured just to find God." 

As she worshiped she says she used to plead with 
the idol, " If thou art God, reveal thyself to me ! 
Reach forth and take the offering I bring. Let me 
see, hear, or feel something by which I may know I 
have pleased thee, and that my great sin is pardoned, 
and I am accepted by thee ! " But no sense of peace 
came, and at the end of three years of this self-inflicted 
suffering she felt that she had done all that she possibly 
could. 



36 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

" I have done and suffered all that could be re- 
quired of mortal, by god or man, and yet without 
avail/' she declared. 

She returned to Midnapur, and for a time sup- 
ported herself by teaching the sacred books to the 
women of several prominent families there. She her- 
self, however, had now lost all faith in Hinduism, 
and one day gathered up her idols and gave them to a 
woman of low caste, saying: 

" You may worship these if you like ; I have done 
them homage many long weary years — all in vain. I 
will never worship them again! There is nothing in 
Hinduism or I would have found it." 

One day when she went to visit a friend she found 
her reading some Christian books. This was the first 
time that Chundra Lela had seen any Christian litera- 
ture, and when she learned that an American teacher 
had given her friend the books she asked if she might 
come and meet the teacher at the lesson time the fol- 
lowing day. The American teacher, who was Miss 
Julia Phillips of the American Free Baptist Mission, 
was unable to come the next day, but the Bible woman 
who came in her place was so much impressed by 
Chundra Lela that, when she went back to the mis- 
sion and told about her, Miss Phillips decided to go 
to see her at once. From Miss Phillips, Chundra Lela 
heard the Christian story for the first time, and from 
her she received the first Bible she had ever seen. 
Day and night Chundra Lela studied this Bible, and 
when her pupils came to her to hear her read the books 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 37 

of Hinduism, she read to them from the Bible in- 
stead. 

" This new book is a good book/' she told them, 
and they agreed with her, but their husbands be- 
came alarmed and threatened Chundra Lela. 

" If you become a Christian," they told her, " we 
will all turn you out, and people will call you mad and 
beat and stone you ! " But Chundra Lela refused to 
be intimidated. 

"I am not *af raid," she answered. "You people 
cannot hold me, and need not try. You yourselves 
ought to become Christians." And then she would 
begin to explain the gospel story. 

After she had been studying her Bible for about 
two months, she went to the missionaries and told 
them that she wanted to take her stand as a Chris- 
tian. Dr. J. L. Phillips asked her : " You say you have 
worshiped all these idols; have you got pardon for 
your sin? " 

" I have worshiped every idol I know," Chundra 
Lela answered. " I have gone on all pilgrimages and 
done all the Hindu religion has taught; but I know 
nothing about pardon, and have had no peace." 

" Cannot your idols forgive sins?" Dr. Phillips 
asked again. " If not, how will you get pardon? " 

" I have now read about Jesus," Chundra Lela told 
him joyously, " and learn that he is the Savior and 
can save and pardon me. Believing this, I wish to be- 
come a Christian." 

The next day Chundra Lela attended a Christian 



38 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

church service for the first time, and heard her first 
sermon from the lips of Dr. Phillips. 

" Oh, what a sermon! " she exclaimed. " While I 
sat listening my heart was stirred within me, and I felt 
that I had found that for which I had long sought. I 
wished to leave Hinduism and all its cruel deceptions, 
and come out at once." 

After the service she told Dr. Phillips that she 
wanted to be baptized. He warned her, 

" When you become a Christian you will have 
great sorrow. All will forsake you; and if you get 
no rice to eat, what will you do then?" 

" God feeds the birds," Chundra Lela answered, 
" will he not feed me ? He who made the mouth, can 
he not put food into it ? God will take care of me. I 
am not afraid." 

Very soon after this she packed up all her belong- 
ings and moved to the home of the native pastor of 
the church. The news that she had gone to live with 
the Christians spread rapidly, and many of her friends 
and students gathered together and went to her, seek- 
ing to induce her to come back to them. But she told 
them that she could be a Hindu teacher no longer, for 
she was no longer a Hindu but a Christian. As proof 
positive that she meant what she said, she asked the 
pastor's wife to bring her a cup of water, and drank 
the water before them, thus publicly breaking caste by 
drinking from a dish which a Christian's hand had 
touched. Then, indeed, her friends were convinced, 
and went away, regretfully admitting that since Chun- 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 39 

dra Lela had broken her caste she could be nothing 
more to them. 

After her baptism the missionaries gave Chundra 
Lela work in the mission schools for children, and 
suggested that she teach the women in the zenanas to 
read. But she was too full of joy in the wonderful 
good news she had learned to be willing to give her 
time to teaching people how to read. At length she 
had found the God for whom she had sought so long ; 
at last her soul was at peace, and she felt that she 
must tell others the glorious truths she had learned. 
Whenever she had a free moment she took her Bible 
and went from house to house, often telling the story 
tc groups in the streets until great crowds had gath- 
ered to hear her. She would scarcely stop to eat or to 
rest in the daytime, waiting until night to cook and 
eat her food. So the missionaries set her free from 
her other work and let her give her entire time to 
publishing abroad what great things the Lord had 
done for her. 

After she had worked in and around Midnapur 
for several years, Chundra Lela conceived the idea of 
going to some of the shrines which she had visited as 
a Hindu, to share her joy with the pilgrims who were 
seeking God as she had sought him; and once again 
she set out on a pilgrimage lasting several years. 
There were as many hardships to be met on this pil- 
grimage as on her early one, perhaps more, for she 
was getting older and was not so vigorous as she had 
been; she no longer had a bag of gold pieces around 



4 o COMRADES IN SERVICE 

her waist, but often suffered from lack of food; and 
her fearless preaching of Christianity often brought 
persecutions upon her. Once she was beaten by an 
angry priest; a man with a sword threatened to 
kill her; the Hindu priests hired a mob to stone 
her; and once she was brought before the police for 
preaching Christianity. But in spite of poverty, ill- 
ness, and persecution this pilgrimage was a shining 
way for Chundra Lela. No longer was she blindly and 
fruitlessly seeking pardon for sin and fellowship with 
God. The Great Companion was always with her, the 
sense of his love and peace were ever in her heart, and 
no difficulties or trials were worthy to be compared 
with the joy of telling about him to those who were 
seeking and needing him, even as she had sought and 
needed him. In the course of her journeys she went 
to her own country, Nepal, and was there granted the 
great happiness of winning her brother to Christ. 

For over thirty years Chundra Lela went to and 
fro, from early morning until late in the evening, 
seeking to bring to her hungry-hearted Indian people 
the knowledge of a joyous gospel which would satisfy 
their every need. She went to all classes of people. 
Mrs. Lee, a missionary who learned to know her 
well, says : 

" One day she would be found sitting at the feet of 
a native princess, reading the Bible to her and the 
women of the palace; another day in the bazaar, 
preaching to the throngs that come and go. At other 
times we have seen her come quietly into a room filled 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 41 

with educated native gentlemen, and seating herself in 
her favorite position on the floor, begin to talk to 
them. At first they are inclined to ridicule her; but 
she goes on, until soon they forget she is a woman, 
and are astonished at her knowledge of their own 
sacred books, of which she is able to repeat, from 
memory, page after page. Soon they feel her su- 
periority, and one after another, in their intense inter- 
est, draw nearer and take their seats on the ground 
before her. She will hold them for hours, telling 
them of their own religion and its emptiness. She 
then presents Jesus in such a way that it seems to make 
them want to know him." 

Mrs. Lee tells of one occasion on which Chundra 
Lela was preaching to a great company of people, 
when a missionary who was in the crowd said to the 
head man: 

" How can you answer such truths as these ? " 

" Oh," the man answered, " these women know 
nothing ! Wait till you hear the wisdom of our priest." 
He went away and soon returned with the priest, who 
took his place among the people with much dignity. 
Chundra Lela looked up and greeted the priest pleas- 
antly, and remarked to the crowd, 

" All this man knows I taught him, for it was I 
who taught him the Vedas (sacred books), and 
taught him to repeat prayers to the gods, and to per- 
form priestly ceremonies." 

When she was about sixty-five years old and was 
growing feeble, the missionaries of the mission, of 



42 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

which she was a member, proposed building a house 
for her. 

" What do you think ? " she exclaimed to Mrs. Lee. 
" What do you think? The l Sihiab logue ' (mission- 
ary gentlemen) have built me a house to die in ! When 
they first mentioned it to me I said, ' What ! a house to 
die in ? Do you know where I am to die ? It might be 
in the train, or on the river steamer ; it might be in the 
distant jungle, or perhaps while preaching in the street. 
How will you gentlemen build me a house to die in ? ' 
1 Oh,' said they, ' it is true we do not know; but when 
you are ill, as you were a few months ago, or tired, and 
wish to rest awhile, it will be well for you to have a 
house of your own.' ' How you friends do trouble 
me ! What would I do with a house ? I wish to be 
free from care. Then, too, it would cost money to 
keep it up.' * Very well ; but we will give you a pension 
of a small amount monthly, and from this you could 
keep it in repair.' And I yielded." 

" One day after the Conference was over and we 
were back in Midnapur," she went on to Mrs. Lee, 
" the missionaries said to me, ' Come and see the spot 
we have selected for your house — under these mango 
trees, where you will be nice and quiet.' ' What ! ' I 
said, i away off in this field? Oh, no! If you will 
build me a house, build it on the roadside — close up — 
so that when I am too old and weak to walk, I may 
crawl up to the door and preach to the people as they 
pass by.'" 

So the missionaries did as she asked and built her 



A PILGRIM OF INDIA 43 

" a house by the side of the road, where the races of 
men go by." 

"And now I can preach as long as I live!" she 
exclaimed joyously. 

And as long as she lived, she did preach. As she 
grew more feeble it seemed sometimes that she was 
almost too weak to speak. But if there was an oppor- 
tunity to tell of the Pearl of Great Price for which she 
had sought so earnestly, and for the sake of which, 
when she found it, she had gladly given up all, the 
joy of the Lord would prove her strength and the old 
light would come flooding back into her face, and her 
voice would become strong and clear. And when the 
door into the Other Room opened, and she was sum- 
moned to enter into the joy of her Lord, she went with 
a shining face. 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 



I will never quit until I see education spread all through 
these hills. 

— /. A. Burns. 




J. A. BURNS 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS - 

In the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky live more 
than a half million Americans of whom most of 
us know very little. A little over two hundred years 
ago their ancestors were roaming the highlands of 
Scotland; later their great-great-grandfathers took up 
their muskets in the struggle for the freedom of the 
colonies; and fift> years ago one hundred and twenty 
thousand of them left their mountain cabins to fight 
for the unity of their young country. The people who 
know them say that they are worth knowing; that 
they are most loyal citizens, vigorous in body and 
mind, friendly and fearless in spirit, unfalteringly 
true to their ideals of honor, and given to the most 
kindly and gracious hospitality. 

Yet these Highlanders of America are slaves, made 
so not by the power of men but by the power of 
illiteracy. All around them America has been grow- 
ing into a land more wonderful than the brightest 
dreams of the first settlers. But if Daniel Boone 
could take another trip through the Cumberland Moun- 
tains of Kentucky he would see no startling changes 
either in the country or the people. He would travel by 
the waterways, or over narrow trails, just as he used to 
do, for there still are no roads. The little log cabins 
in whose one or two narrow rooms from ten to twenty 

45 



46 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

people are crowded would look very familiar to him. 
" The loom, the spinning-wheel, the lard-kettle, the 
candle-mold, the squirrel rifle," which are in those 
cabins now, are just like those of a hundred years ago; 
and just as in those days the women stand behind the 
tables while their sinewy husbands and sons eat; and 
ride, sunbonneted, behind them on horseback to the 
little log churches. 

One difference however, Daniel Boone might notice. 
In his day not a few of the little cabins had book- 
shelves on which stood copies of ancient masterpieces 
of Greek and Roman literature. Some of the books 
are there still, but in homes where no man, woman, or 
child can either read or write. It has been hard to 
make a living in the Cumberland Mountains, and dur- 
ing this last marvelous century, teeming with inven- 
tions and the development of industries, the men of the 
mountains have spent all the days of their lives la- 
boriously raising their scanty crops with the help of 
the implements of a hundred years ago. The women 
meanwhile have been growing old at the hard work of 
making by hand every article of clothing and food 
and household furnishing which has been needed. 

In this country and among these people lives 
J. A. Burns. His father was a Primitive Bap- 
tist minister, who rode through the country preach- 
ing in the little log churches on Saturdays and 
Sundays, and worked on his hillside farm during the 
rest of the week. In order to live father and mother 
and children all worked incessantly. Every morning 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 47 

before it was dawn Burns was up and out in the smoke- 
house, grinding corn or wheat for breakfast in the little 
hand-mill. " This hand-mill," he says, " was made of 
two round stones, the top one working on a little 
wooden spindle which stuck up through the bottom 
one. You poured the wheat in a hole at the middle of 
the upper stone. The flour came out through a little 
outlet at the edges between the stones. There was a 
hickory handle which was fitted into the top stone, 
the upper end of the handle working in a supporting 
frame. This made the stone turn more easily. Two 
persons could turn it. It was done after the fashion of 
Palestine. It was the best mill we had. In perhaps 
fifteen minutes I would have flour or meal enough 
ground for breakfast. It was sweet flour. If we 
wanted to remove some of the grits or husks we would 
take a circular hoop made out of basswood bark and 
covered with a piece of muslin, and screen the flour 
through this." 

After breakfast was over the boy took his hoe and 
went out to the steep hillside to try to raise more corn. 
Sometimes he went to the little wheat-field to reap, 
the best instrument for reaping which he knew about 
being a long sickle or " reap hook," which left many 
a scar on the fingers of his left hand. He remembers 
that when he first saw a reaping " cradle " he thought 
that it certainly was the best and easiest method of 
harvesting wheat which could possibly be invented. 
A reaping-machine would have seemed to him then 
nothing short of a miracle. When he and his brothers 



48 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

had cut down the wheat, they brought their little bun- 
dles to the threshing-floor, and threshed them with 
flails made of a piece of hickory, one short section of 
which had been hammered and twisted until the fibers 
were loosened into a " hinge." After the wheat was 
threshed it had to be winnowed, very much as it used to 
be in Palestine when the grain and the chaff were 
tossed up letting the wind blow the chaff to one side. 
Burns had a share in every process which the wheat 
went through until it was ready to be put into the 
oven, and until he was sixteen years old he never tasted 
bread made with any other flour than the kind he 
ground in his little hand-mill. 

When Burns was thirteen years old, his father 
was preaching in West Virginia in a county which 
boasted a little school, and there the boy went for just 
three months. The next year he had three months 
more in school, and the year following four months. 
After that he worked for an older brother for some 
time; then supported himself in any way he could, 
farming a little, sometimes working for small wages, 
sometimes taking rafts of logs down the Kentucky 
river — doing whatever offered for a living. He grew 
tall and big-boned like most of the mountain men, and 
unusually powerful. 

The French-Eversole feud was raging in his early 
manhood, and Burns was in it. And one night in the 
course of that feud something happened which changed 
the current of life not only for Burns, but for a multi- 
tude of mountain boys like him. The enemy were 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 49 

barricaded in a log cabin which Burns and his fellow 
combatants were determined to take. In the course 
of the struggle Burns received a terrific Mow on 
the head from a rifle barrel, and being thought dead 
was dragged by his feet from the dooryard and thrown 
over a fence where he would be out of the way of the 
fighting. But Burns was not dead. Long after the 
fighting was over he crawled down to a near-by cabin 
for food. As his strength came back, however, he did 
not hurry to join his fellow feudists. A blow on the 
head could not frighten him but it could sober him, and 
he turned his face away from the settlement to the 
lonely mountains. 

For four days he was alone in the mountains, and 
when he came out it was with the determination to go 
to college! Alone in the stillness of the forests he 
had been asking why God had brought him back from 
the dead. There must be some purpose in what had 
befallen him. In the quiet days away from the rest of 
the world he saw his people as he had never seen them 
before. He could say of them then as now, " They 
are the finest, bravest, fairest-minded people in the 
world/' but seeing them so, he saw as never before the 
pity of their ignorance, with all its attendant evils of 
poverty and narrowness and enmity. He believed that 
God had given him back his life that he might serve 
this people, and he was sure that what they needed 
most was an opportunity for Christian education. 
This he determined to help them to get. He had no 
money, and he had had but ten months in school him- 



50 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

self, but he went out from the mountains to prepare 
himself to teach. 

For seven months Burns managed to support him- 
self at the preparatory school of Denison University, 
in Granville, Ohio. Then he went back to his moun- 
tains, as penniless as when he had come, but with seven 
more months of school life added to the ten which he 
had had in West Virginia. The next year he taught 
a hundred eager little mountain boys and girls at 
" Raider's Creek," and in the six years that followed 
started schools in various other parts of the moun- 
tains. One year he taught at Berea College, Berea, 
Kentucky. Always the children flocked to him, 
hungry for the chance to study, and always his own 
education was growing both deeper and broader. And 
always in his heart he carried a vision — of which he 
almost never spoke — a vision of a time when in the 
heart of the wild, feud-fraught mountains there should 
be, not just little log-cabin country schools open for 
a few months a year, but a strong, splendid, permanent 
college ! He had no money for a college, and no idea 
where to get it. But in 1899 he decided that the time 
had come to take the first step. 

It was a troublous time in which to start a college. 
The Baker-Howard feud was on, and there had been 
much bloodshed. But Burns wanted to talk to the men 
of both sides about a college for their boys, so he 
called a meeting, himself a sort of hostage and pledge 
of good faith. About fifty men filed silently into the 
old mill that day, half of them on the Baker side, half 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 51 

on the Howard. " It was a mighty quiet meeting," 
Burns says. In absolute stillness they seated them- 
selves on opposite sides of the room, every man with 
his gun on his arm, every one perfectly quiet but alert. 
Then Burns stood in the center and pleaded with them. 
He told them that they were rearing their sons for 
slaughter, and begged them to stop fighting and help 
him build a college where the boys could have an 
education. 

" I didn't know what they were going to do," he 
said afterward, " but I was right glad when Lee 
Combs got up, and when Dan Burns got up too, and 
they met in front of me. They did not draw, but they 
shook hands. Then I knew that the college was going 
to be a success." 

A few days later twelve of these men came together 
in the little log church, and there six of them signed 
their names and six put their marks to an application 
for a state charter which would permit them to found 
a college in their mountains. 

When Burns started his college he had not one dol- 
lar. But one of the men who had put his mark to the 
application for a charter gave him fifty dollars, and 
some one else gave him some land, and he went to 
work. A blacksmith made him some stone-working 
tools out of a crowbar, and he began to cut the founda- 
tion-stones out of the mountain. Alone in the dawn 
one morning he laid the first stone of the first founda- 
tion of Oneida Institute. 

" I set it as firmly as I could," he says, " in the 



52 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

wish that it might stand long; and then, all alone on 
the hillside, I stretched out my arms and offered up as 
good a prayer as I knew how. About then a young 
feudist came riding over the hill beyond, perhaps from 
some raid in which he had been engaged the night 
before. It was sun-up, and he saluted the rising day 
with a volley of pistol shots; still, I presume, full of 
the fury of combat. I accepted that volley of shots as 
a challenge to my prayer. Three years later I baptized 
that young feudist, and he rides on feuds no more." 

Single-handed, Burns hewed his stones and laid his 
foundations. When he began on the woodwork several 
of his neighbors joined him, and work went on all 
day and often late into the night. If Burns went 
home at night, he had to walk five miles over the hills, 
each way; so usually he worked until ten or eleven or 
midnight, and then curled up in the soft shavings 
under his carpenter's bench for the rest of the night. 

The year after this first building, a boys' dormitory, 
was finished, Burns went to Louisville, Kentucky, to 
a convention of Baptist ministers. He was asked to 
speak of his work, and those who heard that speech 
still talk of it. 

" J. A. Burns," says Emerson Hough, " is an orator 
of unusual power, a cultured and educated man of 
singular purity of speech." His brother ministers were 
not wealthy men, but the story that he told with his 
" natural and convincing oratory," gripped them, and 
they gave him four hundred dollars. A family in 
Louisville added five thousand, and with the help of 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 53 

the building materials which the mountains afforded 
and the labor which the men of the mountains cheer- 
fully contributed Burns built a ten thousand dollar brick 
recitation hall. Two years after this building was fin- 
ished the boys were crowding to the school in such 
numbers that another dormitory was an urgent neces- 
sity. Burns had no money, but he started the dormi- 
tory. The neighbors gave what money they could, 
their labor, and their keen interest; some people out- 
side the mountains helped, and a year later a sub- 
stantial brick dormitory, worth ten thousand dollars, 
opened its doors. 

All this time Burns was not only architect and con- 
tractor and builder, but president and teacher and 
student as well. 

"You see that big, flat rock yonder?" he said to 
Mr. Hough, as they stood on the bank of the Kentucky 
river. " Well, that is the best fishing-place on the 
Kentucky river. It is lucky for me that it was. 
When I was beginning my work in Latin and some of 
the mathematics, my boys in the school up yonder 
on the hill were crowding hard on my heels all the 
time, and knew about as much as I did. I was on a 
keen jump, and just one day ahead of them. Moreover, 
I hadn't anything to eat, in those days. My friend 
and fellow teacher and myself used to set our trawl- 
lines just out beyond that flat rock. Then we used to 
study our next day's lessons in Latin and geometry 
by the light of a fire. ' God bless the catfish ! ' I 
have said ever since. If it had not been that we had 



54 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

been favored in our fishing, I don't know what might 
have happened to Oneida college ! " 

They were worth every effort, these boys of the 
Kentucky Highlands. The chance to learn was like 
food to the starving, and no price that they could pay 
too great, no struggle too long. 

" One boy came to me," Burns told Mr. Hough, 
" limping and tired. He had tuberculosis of the hip. 
He had no coat, hardly any shoes, almost no trou- 
sers, and he carried a carpetbag tied together with a 
piece of twine. His hair stuck out through his hat. 
He had walked twenty or thirty miles. He said he 
wanted an education. . . . One day I heard some of 
my scholars whispering together out in the hall. 
Whispering is against the rules, and I went out to dis- 
perse them. There seemed to be some conspiracy, 
and I found out what it was; those poor boys, who 
had earned a few cents by working on our farm, were 
taking up a collection, five cents, ten cents each, to get 
the ' new boy' a better pair of pants! I did not dis- 
miss that meeting." 

That " new boy " is soon to be in charge of educa- 
tional work himself. Nine times the bad hip was 
operated on, and the ninth time it was cured. 

The report of Oneida college spread across the 
Kentucky river into the Bullskin Valley, and one day 
" old man Combs " put two of his daughters on the 
back of a mule, took a third on another mule with him, 
and rode the fifty miles to the river, forded it, and 
drew up before the college door. Neither he nor any 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 55 

one of the daughters could read or write, and he had 
brought them to the place where they could learn. 
Tears streamed down the faces of the girls and stood 
in the eyes of Burns of the Mountains when he told 
them that there was no room in which they could sleep, 
no food for them to eat, and no money with which to 
buy these things. With sad face the old man turned 
the mules' heads and started on the homeward jour- 
ney. 

" I watched them ford the river again, and turn 
back up the Bullskin Valley," Burns said. " My heart 
bled for them. I knew what they were going back to." 

As he had dreamed of a college for the boys, so 
now Burns began to dream of a dormitory for the 
girls, which would make it possible for them to study 
with their brothers. So presently he gave out con- 
tracts for the building, engaged workmen, and went 
out to find some money. He went to Carrolton, where 
the White's Run Baptist Association was meeting, and 
with twenty cents, which constituted his entire capital, 
in his pocket, told his friends what he wanted to do. 
" Then," he says, " Mr. Carnahan, who has done so 
much for this college, said he would help on my labor 
pay-roll; and we borrowed five thousand dollars of a 
building and loan association that wasn't afraid to 
lend to the Lord." 

This dormitory was only a beginning of good things 
for the girls. The generous gift of a woman in New 
York who heard Burns tell of the ambitious, respon- 
sive mountain children, has made possible another ten 



56 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

thousand dollar brick building, where cooking, sew- 
ing, sanitation, and other household subjects are 
taught. 

No boys were ever more eager for a chance than 
these girls of the mountains. Some of them write Mr. 
Burns letters like this: 

" Prof. Burns 
oneda Ky 

I though i would write you to See if i could enter 
School with you all one a Free tuishen my father 
is ded and my mother is to Poor to send me to School 
and is not evan able to Furnish my Books and Close 
and Would Like to help make Suport fur the Familey 
and the way i am i Cant my ege is 19 and if you Cant 
hold me a Place in School can I get a job of house 
work. Can work at most anything in the house. 

i have a hard way of Living and making my 
Suport i live in the Country and cant get anything fur 
my work, now you let me Just what you will do and 
Let me no what you will Pay a week for cooking if i 
cant get in School. 

if i had Lurning i could make my mother Suport 
But as i am i cant 

will close hoping to here frome you Soon 

your reSPCtful 

P.S. Let me no if i can get in or i cant." 

When these girls have had a chance to " have lurn- 
ing," they write papers which read, in part, like this : 

" It is not an uncommon thing to find, anywhere in 
these mountains, families of ten or twelve living in 
one or two small rooms. There is practically no 




ALONE IN THE MOUNTAINS 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 57 

ventilation, the food is only half cooked, and the 
natural outcome is that some member of the family is 
nearly always sick. To those who know the impor- 
tance of sanitation, wholesome, nutritious food, and 
pure air, it is not strange that so many people of the 
mountains are dying from tuberculosis and other con- 
tagious diseases. Very few of the people believe that 
tuberculosis is contagious, and therefore make no fight 
against it. The same holds with other preventable and 
curable diseases from which thousands are dying each 
year. 

" Only for the past few years have we been alive to 
the fact that in order to make the mountain home what 
it should be, the girls must be educated. Since this 
is true, then, do not let us neglect the most important 
part of our training, training for that vocation for 
which every girl should prepare herself, the most 
sacred position any girl can hold, that of home- 
maker. 

" The rise or fall of the future generation of moun- 
taineers rests with the girls and boys of the present 
day, and, I should say, the greater responsibility rests 
w r ith the girls. The woman has the training of the 
children, and by surrounding them in the home with 
those things which tend to best development, phys- 
ically, mentally, and morally, she will be laying the 
foundation on which the success of their lives and the 
greatness of the nation depend." 

It does not take a great amount of money to get 
" lurning " at Oneida Institute, — only four dollars a 



58 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

month for room, board, and tuition. Very little money 
is paid out for food or servant hire. The boys culti- 
vate the fields, and raise nearly all the food which the 
five hundred and twenty-four students eat, and in the 
doing of it learn modern scientific methods of agricul- 
ture which will help them to win such crops from their 
mountain soil as it has never before yielded. The 
girls not only study the theory of home-keeping, but by 
practical experience they learn how to care for their 
dormitory rooms, how to dress suitably, how to cook 
and serve wholesome food. Last summer they put up 
six hundred gallons of fruit and wild blackberries for 
use on the school table. 

"The breed of Lincoln is not gone!" Emerson 
Hough declared, after he had met Burns of the Moun- 
tains. Burns too is an emancipator, he too is setting 
a people free — free from the bondage in which igno- 
rance has held them. And they are a people worthy 
of their freedom. 

Of them Burns says : " If these people were what the 
outside world has so long supposed them to be — savage, 
selfish, lawless, broilers, feudists, murderers — I would 
not try to help them, nor wish to do so. But they are 
not that. They are a simple, bold, honorable, gen- 
erous, and able people, a splendid stock; and they 
must not be allowed to go on as they have — they are 
too good for that." " We want our place in the ranks 
of the useful citizenship of America," he cries. " We 
are not content either to stand still or to slip back as 
we have been doing. We want out and we want up! 



A MAN OF THE MOUNTAINS 59 

However much the country helps us, we will pay it 
back again. " 

Pledge and prophecy of what his mountaineers can 
be is Burns himself, " a college president with only 
seventeen months of school," who has built ■' a hun- 
dred thousand dollar college with no better start than 
twenty cents." " J. A. Burns," says Emerson Hough, 
" will live and die in that valley, not much heralded, 
not much known, but his part of the country and ours 
will have been the better for his life and his vision. 
Such men give us a better hope of the future of Amer- 
ica. I felt the strength of America itself back of 
this simple mountaineer when I talked with him." 

" Some of you remember me when I came here, and 
you know me now," one of the Oneida girls said when 
she graduated. " If I am anything, if I ever shall be 
anything, I gratefully acknowledge it to be the work 
of this institution and especially of Professor Burns. 
Often the one thought that some day I may, in some 
way, be able to show my appreciation for what he has 
done for me, that I may, perhaps, please him, as a 
slight return for his influence, has forced me on when 
nothing else could." 

And Mr. Hough writes, " There was something I 
wanted to say to him and never did say — I wanted to 
tell him how ashamed I was of my life, which had 
made so little out of good opportunity, whereas others 
have made so much out of none." 

But Burns of the Mountains thinks not at all of what 
people say of him — his mind is too full of the vision 



60 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

splendid of a new and radiant day for the children of 
the Cumberlands. " I never will quit/' he pledges, 
" I never will be done until I see education spread all 
through these hills. I ask God to spare me till that 
time has come." 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 



Be so busy living that you never have time to take thought 
of dying, for when you have learned how to live, you needn't 
be bothered with learning how to die. 

— Kaji Yajima. 




KAJI YAJIMA 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 

Eighty-two years ago a baby girl was born in the 
home of one of the " town supervisors " of the prefec- 
ture of Kumamoto, Japan. Her father was a man 
of much prominence and influence, but there were 
many poor people in his district who needed to learn 
how to earn a living and to make the most of the little 
they had ; and, in order to help to teach them how, the 
town supervisor and his family worked as hard and 
lived as simply as they did. Just as soon as the six 
little girls of the family were old enough they learned 
to help their mother take care of the silkworms, to reel 
and weave the silk, and later to cut it and make it into 
kimonos. All day long they were busy with this work 
and household tasks, but in the evening they, with 
their brother, gathered about their mother, who taught 
them to make the difficult characters of the Japanese 
alphabet, with a soft brush, and to understand what 
they meant. There were no schools for girls in Japan 
in those days, but these little girls never missed them, 
for, after they had learned from their mother how to 
read and write, their father taught them the Confucian 
classics and the ancient literature of Japan. 

When Kaji, next to the youngest of these little girls, 
was about twenty years old, she married. The hardest 

61 



62 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

years of her life followed, for her husband proved to 
be a drunkard, and in spite of his wife's influence he 
never succeeded in conquering his weakness. For sev- 
eral years Mrs. Yajima did her utmost to help her hus- 
band and make a home, but at last she was released, 
and, broken in health, went back to her parents. Her 
only thought at this time was to spend the rest of her 
life there in peace and quiet. No other idea ever oc- 
curred to her. No life outside the home was open 
to women in old Japan, and, moreover, even the men of 
Japan began to think of retiring from active life at 
forty or fifty, and Mrs. Yajima was now almost forty 
years of age. 

But great changes had been taking place in the little 
island empire during the years of Mrs. Yajima's mar- 
ried life. At the time of her marriage Japan was a 
medieval nation in all that the term implies. Condi- 
tions there were very similar to those in the Scotland 
of Sir Walter Scott's novels. A feudal clan system 
prevailed, the country being divided among several 
great military nobles, known as Daimios, each with 
fortified castle and retinue of armed retainers of 
Samurai. Nominally the country was ruled by the 
emperor, but in reality the emperor was a helpless 
puppet, the actual power being in the hands of the most 
powerful of the military nobles, who was known as 
the shogun. 

Japan at this time was not only medieval: she was 
also a hermit nation, living in absolute isolation from 
all the rest of the world. She had not always been 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 63 

thus closed to all outside influences. In the sixteenth 
century she had been open to trade with Europe, and 
with the traders had come Roman Catholic mission- 
aries who were very successful in winning converts. 
But after some years of trade with Spain and Portugal 
Japan began to suspect that these nations were plan- 
ning to overthrow her, and that the missionary priests 
were their agents. In 1614, the shogun believed that 
he had discovered a plot to undermine his power ; and 
he at once issued an edict, denouncing all missionaries 
as enemies of the gods and of Japan, and ordering 
them, and all Japanese who had become priests, to leave 
the country at once. He also ordered all native Chris- 
tians to recant, on pain of death. In the years that 
followed thousands upon thousands of Japanese Chris- 
tians suffered unspeakable tortures rather than give 
up their faith. They were crucified, buried alive, 
burned at the stake, torn limb from limb, and hideously 
tortured, rather than recant. At one time thirty-seven 
thousand of them were massacred together. Finally 
Christianity seemed almost stamped out, but as late as 
1873 placards were posted in various public places 
offering generous rewards to all who would give infor- 
mation against those who were suspected of being 
followers of the foreign faith. The shogun also is- 
sued most stringent edicts banishing all foreigners ex- 
cept the Dutch and the Chinese from the country on 
pain of death; sternly forbade any others to enter at 
any future time; and with equal severity forbade any 



64 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

Japanese to leave his country, enforcing this order by- 
destroying all sea-going vessels. 

For two hundred and thirty years Japan succeeded 
in remaining in complete and unbroken isolation. In 
1850 she was the same Japan which in 1624 had 
locked its doors, both outside and in, still living the 
life of the Middle Ages, serenely ignorant of and in- 
different to the stirring modern life of the European 
nations. But in 1853 there came an interruption. A 
representative of a nation which Japan had scarcely 
heard of sailed across the Pacific and knocked politely 
but insistently upon her inhospitable door. In July 
of that year an American squadron anchored at the 
mouth of the Gulf of Yedo, and its commander, Com- 
modore Perry, succeeded after not a little difficulty in 
delivering to the authorities the letter which he brought 
from the President of the United States, urging Japan 
to enter into commercial treaties with the young repub- 
lic across the seas. During the decade following the 
delivery of this letter the long-closed door of Japan 
swung gradually open, until at last treaties had been 
made opening several important ports to trade with 
the United States, England, France, and other nations, 
and also permitting members of these nations to live 
within these ports. The year 1865, when all these 
treaties were ratified by the emperor, marked the final 
ending of Japan's seclusion and medievalism and the 
beginning of a new and stirring life. 

The first step in this new life was the revolution 
which took place in 1868 and was one of the most 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 65 

remarkable revolutions the world has ever seen. Many 
of the strongest Daimios united together against the 
shogun, compelled him to resign, seized the palace at 
Kyoto and proceeded to administer the government in 
the name of the emperor. Civil war followed, but the 
adherents of the emperor soon conquered; the shogun- 
ate which had lasted for seven hundred years was 
overthrown and in a few months the young emperor 
was everywhere acknowledged the real as well as the 
nominal ruler of the nation. 

By the time Mrs. Yajima's married life was ended, 
the old Japan was a thing of the past. The young, 
energetic emperor set himself to the task of bringing 
his nation into line with the modern world as quickly 
as possible, and the rapidity with which he succeeded 
seemed almost miraculous. 

Mrs. Yajima's brother was in the employ of the 
progressive new government, in Tokyo, and it was to 
the very heart of the stirring new life that his illness 
called her in 1871. Many of the things she saw in 
the capital interested her greatly, but none more than 
the schools for boys and girls which were being estab- 
lished under the new educational system, modeled on 
that of Massachusetts. Only a few years before there 
had been only a few schools for boys, and none at all 
for girls, but now the government proposed to estab- 
lish public schools for both boys and girls all over the 
country making attendance at them compulsory. 
The greatest difficulty was in the matter of teachers. 
Hundreds were needed, but how could people who had 



66 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

never been to school themselves know how to conduct a 
school ? The government was trying to meet this diffi- 
culty, however, by a training course for those who 
wished to become teachers in the new schools. The 
first class was just about to begin training when Mrs. 
Yajima's brother was well enough to dispense with his 
sister's care, and he strongly urged her to take the 
course. 

This was a startling idea to Mrs. Yajima. She had 
thought that active life was over for her, and at first it 
seemed impossible to begin a wholly new work and one 
which no Japanese woman had ever attempted before. 
Moreover she had no confidence in her own ability and 
doubted whether she could ever learn to teach. But 
the work attracted her greatly, and she finally yielded 
to her brother's advice and took the training, being a 
member of the first class which received certificates 
from the " Teachers' Training Association," which 
later developed into the government normal school. 

For four years Mrs. Yajima taught in the primary 
schools of Tokyo. As she taught she became increas- 
ingly convinced of the truth of what she has so often 
said since: " Education without religion is only partial 
preparation for life." She came gradually to feel, too, 
that the religion which her parents had taught her was 
not the one which afforded the best preparation for 
living. She had read of the prayer which Commodore 
Perry had made upon entering Japan, in which he 
spoke of the people who had given him none too 
gracious a welcome as his brothers. This thought of 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 67 

the brotherhood of the people of all nations im- 
pressed her very strangely and made her begin to feel 
that the religion of which it was a part could not be all 
bad, in spite of what she had been taught to believe. 
Moreover, when she was in Tokyo, she met certain peo- 
ple who seemed to her different from any she had ever 
known. She says that even before she knew anything 
of the religion which they professed she could not help 
noticing their fineness and strength. One of them was 
a young woman who had taken the teachers' training 
course with her, and at last Mrs. Yajima asked her 
where she went every Sunday and finally began to go to 
church with her. The more she learned of Christianity 
the more it appealed to her, until at last her interest 
became so evident that it attracted the attention of her 
fellow teachers. Religious liberty was not guaranteed 
until 1889, and the placards offering rewards to in- 
formers against Christians remained up until 1873, an d 
Mrs. Yajima found that her interest in Christianity 
led to such hostile feeling against her that she finally 
resigned her position. 

At just about this time Mrs. True, a missionary, was 
establishing a school for girls, but, as she had not yet 
learned the Japanese language, she very much needed 
the help of an able Japanese woman. Mr. Yasukawa, 
pastor of a church in Tokyo, had become acquainted 
with Mrs. Yajima, and at his recommendation she 
went to Mrs. True in 1877 and began the educational 
work for Japanese girls in which she was associated 
with the Presbyterian missionaries for thirty-five years. 



68 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

Her interest in Christianity grew rapidly after she be- 
gan her work with Mrs. True, for Mrs. True's life 
was a constant inspiration to her, and convinced her 
that the religion which she taught must be the true 
one. Not long after coming to Graham Seminary she 
united with the Presbyterian church of which she has 
been a most loyal and faithful member ever since, 
never hesitating even yet, although she is over eighty, 
to walk a mile, alone if necessary, to attend its serv- 
ices. 

Mrs. Yajima worked with Mrs. True in Graham 
Seminary for several years, and then became the 
principal of another Christian school for girls, which 
had been established by a Japanese Christian woman, 
who finally turned it over to the Presbyterian mission. 
In 1890 this school was united with Graham Seminary 
to form the Joshi Gakuin, the splendid Presbyterian 
school for girls in Tokyo. Mrs. Yajima was appointed 
the principal of the new institution, and for over 
twenty years stood at its head. Before she laid down 
her active work in the Joshi Gakuin, in 191 3, she had 
seen it grow into one of the largest and most advanced 
schools for girls in Japan, employing twenty Japanese 
teachers and five missionaries, with an average attend- 
ance of one hundred and sixty girls in the academy and 
thirty in the collegiate department. 

In 1886 the Woman's Christian Temperance Union 
sent Mrs. Mary C. Leavitt to Japan to organize a de- 
partment there. This was no easy task, for, while 
Japan had become almost startlingly modern in many 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 69 

respects, woman's life was the last to feel the effects of 
the fresh impulses from the West. Not many Japanese 
women had as yet dreamed of the possibility of assum- 
ing any responsibilities outside the home, and the idea 
of a great national organization wholly controlled by 
women was appalling to them. It may well be doubted 
whether Mrs. Leavitt could have succeeded in organiz- 
ing the Temperance Union without the whole-hearted 
help of Mrs. Yajima, who went from house to house, 
calling upon strangers as well as friends, firing her 
countrywomen with her own enthusiasm and making 
them believe in the cause so thoroughly that they were 
willing to attempt tasks hitherto undreamed of. Her 
energy and devotion were indefatigable; no effort was 
too great to make for a work which would save other 
homes from that which had ruined hers. Moreover, 
when she was a teacher in the primary schools, she had 
investigated the families of the boys and girls who did 
not do well in their studies and had found that eight 
tenths of these children came from homes where one or 
both parents drank. Mrs. Leavitt could have found no 
more intelligent, no more ardent opponent of sake, 1 the 
Japanese liquor, than Mrs. Yajima, nor could she have 
secured a more capable leader for the new movement. 

After the work was finally started, with a member- 
ship of thirty Christian women, Mrs. Yajima gave every 
atom of time and strength which could be spared from 
her school work to building up the new organization. 
It was not easy. Mrs. Iwamoto, one of the supporters 

1 Pronounced sah'-ke. 



70 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

of the new work, wrote ten years after the Union was 
organized : " Only those who have been in the heart of 
the movement can know how very arduous Kyof okwai 
(Woman's Christian Temperance Union) work has 
been and what patience it cost its first advocates to 
work it up, in the face of all manner of obstacles, to 
its present growth. Naturally there had been opposi- 
tion to women taking up this kind of public work, and 
even Christians have not all been in favor of it. Be- 
sides, Japanese ladies have not nearly the same amount 
of time and money to contribute to public enterprises 
as foreign ladies of equal position in society. It is 
a matter well known how arduous a task it has been 
to keep the work going, as well as support the organ of 
the society, which was begun some years' later, and 
edited solely by Kyof okwai ladies. But Mrs. Yajima 
and her associates have struggled bravely on to this day, 
and both the Christian and non-Christian public have 
come to recognize the monument of their patience and 
labors." 

The matter of financial support was one of the great- 
est difficulties, for even the most interested Japanese 
women had little money to give. But if there was a 
need, Mrs. Yajima refused to be discouraged by lack 
of funds. Little by little, here and there, she herself 
collected 272 yen for the first Rescue Home ; and when 
the Woman's Her aid, which she herself carried on for 
several years, had a deficit she quietly paid it from her 
own funds. 

The work over which Mrs. Yajima now presides 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 71 

consists of sixty-nine branches in various parts of 
Japan, with a membership of over 5,000. Its activities 
are divided into thirteen departments: Legislation, 
Flower Mission, Mothers' Meetings, Rescue Work, 
Soldiers, Literature, Scientific Temperance, Education, 
Hygiene, Work in Factories, Evangelistic Work, 
Anti-Narcotics, and Mercy. Two magazines are now 
published, one of which has a subscription list of 1,200, 
the other of 11,000; a night school for young women 
is carried on ; a rescue home endeavors to do both pre- 
ventive and reformative work; and so large a work is 
done among children that a young Japanese woman, 
Miss Moriya, gives practically her entire time to that 
department. 

The years during which Japan was at war with 
Russia were overwhelmingly busy ones for Mrs. Ya- 
jima. Many people were eager to send "comfort 
bags " to the sailors, and the government decided to 
permit such bags to be sent provided that the Woman's 
Christian Temperance Union would assume the respon- 
sibility of seeing that at least 30,000 bags were fur- 
nished, and of inspecting each bag to see that no ob- 
jectionable object or literature was contained in it. 
The government seal was entrusted to Mrs. Yajima, 
and the government held her personally responsible 
for the number, size, and contents of all the bags. 
No bag was permitted to go until she had stamped 
it, but after her stamp was on it, it went straight to the 
sailors without further inspection. This meant no 
light responsibility, for in the first place Mrs. Yajima 



72 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

had to guarantee that no less than 30,000 bags should 
be sent, and not a few of her associates felt that this 
number was impossibly large. Then each bag must 
be inspected to see that it held nothing except the 
articles approved by the government, such as towels, 
handkerchiefs, stockings, undershirts, tooth-brushes 
and tooth-powder, writing materials, sewing materials, 
approved medicine, sweetmeats that would not spoil in 
transportation, and other articles. After the bag had 
been inspected a Testament and some leaflets were 
added to its contents, and Mrs. Yajima stamped it. 
After weeks of work 30,000 bags were sent to the 
navy. The Union's work was by no means over, how- 
ever, for no sooner had the men of the navy received 
their bags than the soldiers in the army pleaded for a 
similar gift, and Mrs. Yajima began work on a second 
lot of 30,000. One of her most treasured possessions 
is the set of bowls, decorated with the imperial seal, 
which the emperor sent her as a token of his personal 
appreciation of her months of work on behalf of the 
soldiers ; but no less valued are the five thousand letters 
which came from the men of the army and navy them- 
selves. 

In 1906 the World's Woman's Christian Temper- 
ance Union held a convention in Boston, and Mrs. 
Yajima was asked to bring greetings from Japan. She 
was seventy-four years old, she had never been out- 
side of Japan, and she knew no English, and few of 
her friends encouraged her to make the long journey, 
but she decided to go. She felt that the Woman's 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 73 

Christian Temperance Union in Japan needed two per- 
manent missionaries who could give their full time to 
the work, and she wanted to present that plea to the 
great company at Boston. She had a niece in college 
in California who promised to take her across the con- 
tinent, but she took the long voyage across the Pacific 
alone. While she was on the steamer she learned 
the Shepherd Psalm by heart, in English, that she 
might be able to give that " kokoro kara " (greeting) 
straight from her heart, without an interpreter. 

Mrs. Yajima made a great impression on the audi- 
ence which she addressed in Boston. Both she and her 
niece, who acted as her interpreter, " captured the con- 
vention by the naivete and charm of their responses 
and greetings/' says a report of the gathering. " Con- 
spicuous on the platform stood a Japanese banner of 
crimson satin exquisitely embroidered in white and 
gold. ' Our nation is small/ said Mrs. Yajima, ' our 
people are small ; therefore we bring a large banner.' " 
In the course of her address she remarked, " Every 
one who sees me says I am young. I say there is a 
reason that I must be young. I was born in the new 
life of Christianity only twenty-six years ago, so I am 
only twenty-six years old, and I must work at least 
thirty years or forty years more from to-day." At the 
close of her address the great audience rose and gave 
her the " white ribbon cheer," and the national secre- 
taries presented her with beautiful flowers. 

Her visit to America accomplished all that she had 
hoped it might, for the convention pledged itself to 



74 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

support one temperance missionary to Japan and a 
New York member promised to support a second 
worker. Moreover one young woman became so much 
interested in Japan and the work of the Woman's 
Christian Temperance Union there, through meeting 
Mrs. Yajima, that she became one of the two mis- 
sionaries. 

Before leaving America Mrs. Yajima was received 
by President Roosevelt, and tendered to him her grate- 
ful thanks for his service as a mediator between Japan 
and Russia. 

Although over eighty Mrs. Yajima is as indefatiga- 
ble as ever. A recent report from Miss Ruth Davis, 
missionary of the Woman's Christian Temperance 
Union in Japan, reads: "This last May she (Mrs. 
Yajima) passed her eightieth birthday in the city of 
Nagasaki while on a month's tour of the southern 
island of Kyushu. It would be wonderful in any coun- 
try, and it is especially wonderful in Japan, where the 
custom of retiring from active life at the age of fifty 
has not yet gone entirely out of fashion, for a woman 
of Mrs. Yajima's age to undertake such a journey, 
and to succeed in accomplishing the amount of work 
she planned for herself. Altogether she held sixty 
meetings and addressed over fifteen thousand people, 
speaking in girls' high schools, before branches of the 
Woman's Christian Temperance Union and in the 
churches. She organized two new branches of the 
Woman's Christian Temperance Union and gained one 
hundred and fifty active members for the societies 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 75 

which were already in existence. Her traveling com- 
panion tells us that never once in the course of her 
journey did Madame Yajima say she was tired.'' 

When the Yoshiwara x of Tokyo, the section of the 
city given up to houses of prostitution, was destroyed 
by fire, in 191 1, Mrs. Yajima was one of the leading 
spirits in the campaign organized by the Salvation 
Army, the Young Men's Christian Association, and 
the Woman's Christian Temperance Union for the 
purpose of preventing its rebuilding. Although Mrs. 
Yajima was then seventy-eight years old, she presided 
over fifteen of the great mass-meetings held in the 
interests of this campaign, making a short address 
herself on each occasion. She also drew up the peti- 
tion which was presented to the mayor, by her own 
efforts obtained ten thousand signatures to it, and pre- 
sented it to the mayor in person. She received in- 
numerable anonymous letters telling her that unless 
she stopped her efforts to prevent the rebuilding of the 
Yoshiwara her life would not be safe from day to day. 
But Mrs. Yajima paid no heed to these threats and 
went serenely on with her work, though it was often 
necessary for her to return from meetings in her 
jinrickisha at eleven or twelve o'clock at night. 

Mrs. Yajima has lost none of her power as a 
speaker as she has grown older. Dr. Pettee, in giv- 
ing an account of the national convention of the 

1 A district in Tokyo appropriated to the sex evil, with imposing 
buildings and features of most regrettable display of the young 
women devoted to immorality. 



76 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

Woman's Christian Temperance Union, says that her 
age would never be suspected, " as you note the zeal 
and tact with which she presided over that great meet- 
ing, and especially if you were privileged to witness 
the businesslike manner in which she called through 
the telephone for a shorthand reporter to take down 
a full stenographic account of the proceedings. No 
wonder, she was enthusiastically received/' he ex- 
claimed, " being twice given a Chautauqua salute, and 
was unanimously reelected president for another 
year." 

She is still acceptable to the largest audiences. 
A recent note in the Japan Evangelist reads : " A large 
public meeting was held in the evening in an immense 
hall. . . . About one thousand people gathered to 
listen to members of Parliament, who made powerful 
appeals for the highest moral standard. . . . Mrs. 
Yajima made the opening address." " Perhaps no un- 
titled Japanese woman," says Dr. Pettee of Japan, " has 
served on more important committees, graced more 
social functions, or exerted a wider influence in the 
moral uplift of the nation than modest Mrs. Yajima. 
She is loved and honored alike by her own people and 
by foreigners; by Christians and other religionists; 
by those of high estate and also by the lowly poor." 

One of the staunchest of her friends isCountOkuma, 
the present premier of Japan. There is no tie of blood 
between them, but Count Okuma is fond of referring 
to Mrs. Yajima as " nei san " (older sister), claiming 
relationship to her on the ground of the kindred ideals 



THE FRANCES WILLARD OF JAPAN 77 

and ambitions for Japan which both are seeking to 
realize. " I have never known Count Okuma to refuse 
any request Mrs. Yajima made of him," one of her 
friends writes. " Both he and the countess are honor- 
ary members of the Temperance Union and have con- 
tributed generously toward its support, and time and 
again their beautiful home and gardens have been 
opened for its gatherings." Count Okuma has also 
been a frequent speaker at meetings held under the 
auspices of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. 
Mrs. Yajima is herself the living exponent of the 
doctrine which she is constantly giving to the young 
people before whom she speaks. There are two rules 
for a long and happy life, she tells them : first, abstain 
from all things harmful ; second, be so busy with good 
and useful work for others that there is no time for 
thought of self. " Be so busy living," she says, " that 
you never have time to take thought of dying, for 
when you have learned how to live, you needn't be 
bothered with learning how to die." Such advice from 
Mrs. Yajima is very convincing, for no one who knows 
how she fills each day to the brim with glad self-giving 
can doubt that she has so learned to live that when 
she lays down the tasks of earth it will be with joyous 
eagerness to take up the more perfect service of an 
even richer and more radiant life. 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 



I was ready to take all men to my heart 

— Dwight L. Moody. 



■■-. 




DWIGHT L. MOODY 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 

The village of East Northfield, Massachusetts, was 
not a very large place in the middle of the last century, 
and life there used sometimes to seem a trifle slow 
to one of its youthful inhabitants. But there were 
ways to vary the monotony. One was to lead his will- 
ing schoolmates to the cattle sheds of " Squire " 
Alexander, where a number of young steers were kept. 
A quiet climb to the empty rafters suddenly followed 
by a chorus of wild Indian war-whoops and vigorous 
jumping on the loose planks furnished almost un- 
limited excitement for wildly fleeing steers, irate squire, 
and gleeful small boys. The appropriation of the 
squire's old pung to coast down the steep hill below his 
house was another adventure sufficiently reckless to 
be full of zest. Once a neat notice appeared on the 
schoolhouse door, stating that an out-of-town speaker 
would deliver a lecture on temperance there on a cer- 
tain evening. When the evening came the school- 
house was warmed and lighted for the occasion, and 
a number of people gathered to listen to the words 
of wisdom of the lecturer. But no lecturer appeared, 
and the audience finally dispersed, full of indignation 
at the practical joker whose identity no one knew, 
except a certain small boy who was loud in his con- 

79 



80 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

demnation of such a foolish joke. At another time 
this small boy was to give Mark Antony's oration 
over Julius Caesar at the " closing exercises " of the 
district school. Just before his oration he introduced 
a touch of realism by placing on the desk a long nar- 
row box to represent the coffin of the deceased Caesar. 
In the height of his eloquence an impassioned gesture 
knocked off the box cover, and out sprang a terrified 
tom-cat, who dashed wild-eyed into the midst of a 
startled and almost equally terrified audience. 

The stocky little boy who was the perpetrator of all 
these pranks was Dwight Lyman Moody, next to the 
youngest son in the family of nine sturdy Moody 
children. His father died suddenly while he was still 
a very little boy, and practically everything which the 
family owned, even to the kindling in the woodshed, 
was taken by his creditors. Dwight never forgot the 
morning after the kindling-wood had been taken, when 
the children were told to stay in bed until school-time 
to keep warm. 

Many neighbors and friends advised " Widow 
Moody " to break up the home and place the children 
with families which would care for them. But, al- 
though she had nothing left but her children and al- 
most no means of support, Mrs. Moody never for a 
moment considered such a plan as this. It was neces- 
sary, however, to take the boys from school and let 
them go to work while they were still little chaps. When 
Dwight was only ten, an older brother found a place 
for him to work during the winter months in a village 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 81 

thirteen miles from Northfield, and one November 
morning the little fellow left home to take his part in 
the family's difficult task of keeping the wolf from the 
door. 

" Do you know," he said, many years later, " No- 
vember has always been a dreary month to me, ever 
since. As we passed over the river and up the oppo- 
site side of the valley we turned to look back for a last 
view of home. It was to be my last for weeks, for 
months, perhaps forever, and my heart well-nigh broke 
at the thought. That was the longest journey I ever 
took, for thirteen miles was more to me at ten than 
the world's circumference has been ever since." There 
was no thought of turning back, however, for he 
had promised to go, and the Moody boys had been 
taught that a promise must be kept at all costs. 

The Moody children knew much of poverty and 
hard work, nothing of luxuries, and not much of com- 
fort; but their mother taught them not only to be 
satisfied with little, but to share that little with those 
who had less. When she let them vote one evening, 
just as they were sitting down to a very scanty supper, 
whether they would share it with a hungry beggar, 
it was unanimously decided that their slices should 
be cut a little thinner that the hungry man might have 
a part. 

The religious teaching which Dwight L. Moody 
received as a child was very different in one way from 
that which his own children received, for he knew 
almost nothing of the Bible. But though he lacked 



82 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

familiarity with the Book which he afterward held as 
" the dearest thing on earth," he did not lack a knowl- 
edge of the God of whom the Bible taught. Every 
Sunday, rain or shine, the Moody children, big and 
little, started off for church, their lunch pails in one 
hand and in summer their shoes and stockings in the 
other. They spent the day at the church, hearing a 
sermon both morning and afternoon, and then all 
trooped home for supper. 

" Trust in God " was the sum and substance of their 
mother's creed, and even while they were still very 
little things the children showed that they had learned 
to love and trust him too. 

When Dwight was seventeen years old he deter- 
mined to go to Boston to find work. He had no 
money, but he decided that he would go, even if he 
had to walk all the way. His mother could not help 
him, but on his way to the station he met an older 
brother, who gave him five dollars, which was just 
enough to pay his railroad fare. The first days in 
Boston were probably the unhappiest in his life. " I 
remember how I walked up and down the streets try- 
ing to find a situation," he said, many years later, 
" and I recollect how, when they answered me roughly, 
their treatment would chill my soul. But when some 
one would say, ' I feel for you ; I would like to help you 
but I can't ; but you'll be all right soon ! ' I felt 
happy and light-hearted. That man's sympathy did 
me good. It seemed as if there was room for every 
one else in the world, but none for me. For about 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 83 

two days I had the feeling that no one wanted me. I 
never have had it since, and I never want it again. 
It is an awful feeling ! " 

. He had two uncles in the shoe business in the city, 
but they did not offer to give him work, and it was a 
long time before he was willing to ask for it. When 
he finally did go to his uncle, he found him very 
willing to employ him, and for two years he was one 
of the most successful salesmen in his uncle's store. 

It was during his stay in Boston that Mr. Moody 
definitely enrolled himself as a follower of Jesus Christ. 
One day while he was at work wrapping up shoes in 
his uncle's store, his Sunday-school teacher, Mr. Kim- 
ball, came in, and laying his hand on his shoulder 
began to talk with him. " I simply told him of Christ's 
love for him and the love Christ wanted in return," 
Mr. Kimball said. " That was all there was. It 
seemed the young man was just ready for the light 
that broke upon him, and there, in the back of that 
store in Boston, he gave himself and his life to 
Christ." 

" I remember the morning on which I came out of 
my room after I had first trusted Christ," Moody says. 
" I thought the old sun shone a good deal brighter than 
it ever had before. I thought that it was just smiling 
upon me; and as I walked out upon Boston Common 
and heard the birds singing in the trees I thought they 
were all singing a song to me. Do you know, I fell in 
love with the birds ! I had never cared for them be- 
fore. It seemed to me that I was in love with all 



84 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

creation. I had not a bitter feeling against any man, 
and I was ready to take all men to my heart." 

After two years in Boston, Moody decided that 
there was greater opportunity for a young business 
man in the West, and in the autumn of 1856 went to 
Chicago. He secured a good position soon after he 
arrived, and at once allied himself with the Plymouth 
Congregational Church. He was very eager to do 
some kind of Christian work, and having no faith in 
his ability to teach or speak, he decided that he would 
rent a pew in the Plymouth Church and fill it with 
young men every Sunday. There was doubtless a 
large number of much-startled young men in Chicago 
every Sunday morning at this time, for he waited for 
no introductions but hailed perfect strangers on the 
street corner, or invaded the boarding-houses and 
even the saloons, with his novel invitation. His hos- 
pitality was irresistible, and he was soon renting four 
pews and filling every seat in them with his guests each 
Sunday. 

Then he looked around for something to do on 
Sunday afternoons. He soon discovered a little mis- 
sion Sunday-school on North Wells Street, where there 
were sixteen teachers to twelve pupils, and he at once 
constituted himself the school's recruiting agent. The 
first Sunday he appeared with eighteen ragged little 
urchins, who increased the enrolment of the Sunday- 
school one hundred and fifty per cent. Every Sunday 
afternoon for several weeks thereafter he appeared, 
like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, with a troop of new 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 85 

small boys and girls behind him, until the Wells Street 
Sunday-school was so full that he decided that his serv- 
ices were no longer needed. He then devoted his 
energy to building up another mission Sunday-school 
in another part of the city with such success that it 
was soon necessary to rent a larger public hall in which 
to hold it. 

" Sunday was a busy day for me then," Mr. Moody 
used to say. " During the week I would be out of 
town as a commercial traveler, selling boots and shoes, 
but I would always manage to be back by Saturday 
night, Often it was late when I got to my room, but 
I would have to be up by six o'clock to get the hall 
ready for Sunday-school. This usually took most of 
the morning, and when it was done I would have to 
drum up the scholars and new boys and girls. By the 
time two o'clock came we would have the hall full, and 
then I had to keep order while the speaker for the day 
led the exercises. When school was over I visited 
absent scholars and found out why they were not at 
Sunday-school, called on the sick, and invited the 
parents to attend the gospel service. By the time I 
had made my rounds the hour had come for the even- 
ing meeting, where I presided, and following that we 
had an after-meeting. By the time I was through the 
day I was tired out." 

Mr. Moody's irrepressible enthusiasm and energy 
soon built up a thriving Sunday-school of fifteen hun- 
dred pupils, and a large staff of strong teachers. He 
did not act as superintendent himself, and usually left 



86 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

most of the teaching to others, but he was inevitably 
the center of attraction for the children. 

As the school grew, its work naturally extended 
beyond the children to the parents, and the young 
Sunday-school worker soon saw that he could not meet 
the needs and opportunities for work in the neigh- 
borhood and go on with his business as well. The 
struggle that followed this realization was a severe 
one, for young Moody was already an unusually suc- 
cessful business man. He had risen rapidly since 
coming to Chicago, and although less than twenty- 
four years old had earned $5,000 on commissions in 
a single year, in addition to his salary. Moreover it 
was very hard for him to turn his back upon a work 
in which he had been eminently successful, to enter one 
which would require him to do many things for which 
he felt he was not fitted. He knew that he could bring 
young men to church to hear other men preach, and 
could fill a big Sunday-school with pupils for other 
teachers, but it was a long time before he saw that he 
must be ready not only to recruit, but to teach and 
preach as well. 

His first attempts at speaking in public had not met 
with a great deal of encouragement. After his first 
testimony in prayer-meeting a frank old deacon as- 
sured him that, in his opinion, he would serve God 
best by keeping still. Another fellow church-member 
praised his work as a filler of pews, but urged him 
to limit his Christian service to such lines as that, and 
not attempt to speak in public. " You make too many 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 87 

mistakes in grammar," he told him. Moody accepted 
the criticism good-naturedly and humbly. " I know 
I make mistakes/' he said, " and I lack a great many 
things, but I am doing the best I can with what I've 
got." Then after a moment's pause he added, with 
irresistible good-humor and earnestness, " Look here, 
friend; you've got grammar enough — what are you 
doing with it for the Master ? " 

It is not surprising that it was hard for Moody to 
decide to give himself wholly to a task which inevitably 
included some public work. But he finally turned his 
back squarely and forever upon the business world, in 
which he had already achieved notable success and 
which held such glowing promises for the future. 

He had saved $7,000 and he decided to live on this 
as long as it lasted. In order to make it hold out as 
long as possible he left his comfortable boarding- 
house for a cot in the prayer-meeting room of the 
Young Men's Christian Association and irregular 
meals at a cheap restaurant. His one thought was to 
make his savings last, and he did not realize the neces- 
sity of making his health last, too. He used often to 
say in later years, " I was an older man before thirty 
than I have ever been since. A man's health is too 
precious to be as carelessly neglected as was mine." 

Morning, noon, and night young Moody now de- 
voted himself to aggressive Christian work. He kept 
up his big Sunday-school and spent much time visiting 
in the homes of the hundreds of children who filled 
the big hall every Sunday, and interesting the parents 



88 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

in the evangelistic meetings which he was conducting 
almost every evening. He usually secured outside 
speakers for these meetings, but sometimes led them 
himself. Every noon found him at the daily prayer- 
meeting of the Young Men's Christian Association, 
the responsibility for which had been entrusted to him. 
The Rev. H. C. Mabie tells of the first time he met 
Moody, at one of these noon prayer-meetings. 

" As we passed in there was a stocky, bustling 
Simon-Peter sort of a man standing at the door, and 
shaking hands with all who entered. He spoke an 
earnest word to each. At the close of the meeting this 
same man remained to speak and pray with an in- 
quirer or two who had shown signs of interest during 
the meeting. This honest man was Mr. Moody, and 
he made an impression on me for life. I had never 
before seen a layman so making it his business to press 
men into the Kingdom as he seemed to be doing." 

When the Civil War broke out, Moody at once 
joined the western branch of the Christian Commis- 
sion, and gave himself to Christian work among the 
soldiers. 

After the great battle of Pittsburg Landing a large 
company of doctors and nurses were sent from Chicago 
to care for the wounded, and Moody went with them. 
He was one of the first, too, to help with the wounded 
after the battles of Shiloh, and Murfreesboro, and was 
with the army at Chattanooga and Richmond. The 
story of his months with the soldiers is a thrilling one. 
Day after day he stood before great companies of men 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 89 

on the eve of battle, kindling them with his own ardor 
for the Lord of hosts; appealing to them to enroll 
themselves in the army of the Son of God. 

" Crowds and crowds turned out to hear him," says 
General Howard, with whose command he served for 
some time. " He showed them how a soldier could 
give his heart to God. His preaching was direct and 
effective, and multitudes responded with a promise 
to follow Christ." And when the battle was over, and 
the hospital tents were filled with broken and dying 
men, Moody was always there, gentle of touch and 
voice, bringing comfort and peace wherever he went. 
After the war had ended Moody went back to his work 
in Chicago. 

In 1863, in spite of Mr. Moody's strong advice to 
the contrary, the North Market Hall Sunday School 
had been organized into a permanent church, known as 
the Illinois Street Church. Moody felt that it was 
unwise to multiply organizations, and urged the people 
to join some church in the neighborhood, but when he 
saw that the new church was inevitable, he gave him- 
self whole-heartedly to its work. The church was 
open every evening of the week, and Mr. Moody was 
there practically every night, often leading the evan- 
gelistic meetings himself. 

His work in the army had made him known to a much 
larger circle of people than before, and he was in great 
demand for work in the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation and at Sunday-school conventions, but he still 
received some very frank criticisms, and still met them 



90 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

in the humble, teachable spirit which the earnest young 
beginner had shown. 

At one of the conventions at which he spoke, one 
of the speakers who followed him commented very 
unfavorably on his address, saying that it was merely 
a collection of newspaper clippings and the like. When 
this critic sat down, Mr. Moody rose and said that 
he knew that the criticisms which had just been made 
were true, that he recognized his lack of education and 
his inability to make a fine address, and wanted to 
thank the speaker for pointing out his short-comings, 
and to pray that God would help him to do better. 

Very few people ever saw any evidence of the hot 
temper which was a part of Dwight L. Moody's 
natural endowment, but once in a long time when he 
was tried beyond endurance it would flash out sud- 
denly. One evening, after a very earnest meeting, 
Mr. Moody was standing at the door of the room 
where the inquiry meeting was to be held, urging the 
men to come in. The door to this room was on the 
lower landing of the stairway, at the head of a short 
flight, and as Moody stood there a man came up to 
him and deliberately insulted him. Mr. Moody would 
never repeat the insult, but it was such as to make 
him thrust the man from him so violently as to send 
him reeling down the stairway. The man was not 
hurt, but Moody's repentance was instant. A friend 
who was there, says : 

" When I saw Mr. Moody give way to his temper, 
although I could not but believe the provocation was 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 91 

extraordinary, I said to myself, ' This meeting is 
killed. The large number who have seen the whole 
thing will hardly be in a condition to be influenced 
by anything more Mr. Moody may say to-night.' But 
before Moody began the second meeting that night he 
rose, and with trembling voice made a humble apology. 

" ' Friends/ he said, ' before beginning to-night I 
want to confess that I yielded just now to my temper, 
out in the hall, and have done wrong. Just as I was 
coming in here to-night I lost my temper with a man, 
and I want to confess my wrong before you all, and 
if that man is present here whom I thrust away from 
me in anger I want to ask his forgiveness and God's. — 
Let us pray.' 

" There was not a word of excuse or vindication for 
resenting the insult. The impression made by his 
words was wonderful, and instead of the meeting be- 
ing killed by the scene, it was greatly blessed by such 
a consistent and straightforward confession." 

In 1867 and 1872 Mr. Moody visited England, the 
first trip being made chiefly in the interest of his wife's 
health, and the second one for the purpose of doing 
some Bible study under the guidance of English pro- 
fessors. Neither visit was a long one, but Moody made 
a host of friends, three of whom, the Rev. William 
Pennefather, Mr. Cuthbert Bainbridge, and Mr. Henry 
Bewley, strongly urged him to come to Great Britain 
in 1873, f° r a series of evangelistic meetings, promis- 
ing to meet all his traveling expenses and those of his 
party. The work in Chicago was in such a condition 



92 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

that Mr. Moody felt able to leave it, and he and his 
family, with Mr. Sankey, whose singing was an im- 
portant part of the evangelistic campaign, sailed for 
Liverpool in June, 1873. They were somewhat sur- 
prised that the money for their traveling expenses 
did not reach them before they sailed, as had been 
arranged, but when they reached Liverpool they under- 
stood. A letter was awaiting them, telling them that 
all three of the friends who had promised to plan 
and finance this visit in Great Britain had suddenly 
died. 

" God seems to have closed the doors," Mr. Moody 
said to Mr. Sankey. " We will not open any our- 
selves. If he opens the door we will go in; other- 
wise we will return to America." 

That night, in the hotel at Liverpool, Mr. Moody 
found in his pocket an unopened letter which he had re- 
ceived just before sailing. He found that it was from 
the secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association 
of York, England, telling him that he had heard of his 
work among young men in America, and that he hoped 
if he ever came to England he would come to York. 

" The door is only ajar," Mr. Moody exclaimed, 
i( but we will consider the letter as God's hand leading 
to York, and we will go there." 

Mr. Moody arrived in York Saturday morning, and 
began his meetings on Sunday. It was summer-time, 
there had been no time for preparation, and the secre- 
tary of the Young Men's Christian Association was 
practically the only person in York who had ever heard 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 93 

of Mr. Moody. But after the first week the meetings 
grew steadily and rapidly, in both attendance and in- 
terest, and attracted much attention throughout Eng- 
land. After five weeks of meetings in York, during 
which several hundreds professed their purpose to 
become Christians, Mr. Moody accepted an invita- 
tion to Sunderland, where the meetings were even 
larger than those in York. The meetings in Sunder- 
land were followed by several weeks of very successful 
work in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in November Mr. 
Moody began ten weeks of meetings in Edinburgh. 
Early in February, work was begun in Glasgow. The 
interest in the meetings and the response to them were 
everywhere overwhelming. 

During the following year Mr. Moody conducted 
similar meetings in Belfast, Londonderry, Dublin, 
Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham, and Liverpool, 
everywhere preaching to enormous, eager audiences, 
and everywhere winning thousands to allegiance to his 
Master. In March, 1875, ne began his four months' 
campaign in London, the largest city of the world, and 
in many respects one of the most difficult in which to 
hold such services. Most careful preparation had been 
made for this campaign, and a large and earnest com- 
mittee worked closely with Mr. Moody all through it. 
The first meeting was held in Agricultural Hall, which 
was filled with eager listeners throughout the months 
of Mr. Moody's work in London, and a second place 
of meeting, the Bow Road Hall, on the east side of 
London, was also packed every night. 



94 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

" The preaching begins at eight o'clock," an Amer- 
ican who was in London during these meetings wrote 
home. " At half past seven every chair in the hall is 
filled. Late comers, who cannot be packed upon the 
platform, or find standing-room out of range of those 
who are seated, are turned away by the policemen at 
the entrances. ... A Christian cannot look into the 
faces of this serious, hushed, expectant audience of 
eight or ten thousand people without being deeply 
moved by the thought of the issues that may hang on 
this hour. Hundreds, if not thousands of them have 
come from other quarters of the city, from five to ten 
miles away. They sit so closely packed that the men 
wear their hats. Ushers, carrying their tall rods of 
office, are thickly scattered along the entrances and 
aisles. ... At the close of the address, which was 
something less than an hour long, those who wished to 
become Christians were invited to stand up; and sev- 
eral hundred arose." 

" Nothing is clearer than that London has been re- 
markably stirred by the labors of these two evangel- 
ists," the same American wrote. " The windows of 
every print store are hung with their pictures. Penny 
editions of Mr. Sankey's songs are hawked about the 
streets. The stages and the railway stations are 
placarded to catch the travelers for their meetings. 
The papers report their services with a fulness never 
dreamed of before in giving account of religious 
meetings." 

During his four months in London, Mr. Moody 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 95 

held 285 meetings, which it was estimated were at- 
tended by approximately 2,530,000 people. 

During the first winter after his return to America, 
in 1875, h e conducted campaigns in Brooklyn, Phila- 
delphia, and New York, all of which were very largely 
attended and most successful in every way. They 
not only reached vast numbers of people; they also 
touched all kinds of people. A newspaper reported 
of the New York meetings : " In the Hippodrome Mr. 
Moody has gathered day by day the largest audiences 
ever seen in this city. Lawyers, bankers, merchants, 
some of whom scarcely ever enter a church, are just 
as much a part of his congregations as are the second- 
rate and the third-rate boarding-house people men- 
tioned so conspicuously in a recent analysis. All classes 
and conditions of men have been represented in these 
great revival meetings." 

" Whatever philosophical skeptics may say," said 
the New York Times, after the meetings in the Hippo- 
drome had closed, " the work accomplished this winter 
by Mr. Moody in this city for private and public 
morals will live. The drunken have become sober, the 
vicious virtuous, the worldly and self-seeking unselfish, 
the ignoble noble, the impure pure, the youth have 
started with more generous aims, the old have been 
stirred from grossness. A new hope has lifted up 
hundreds of human beings, a new consolation has come 
to the sorrowful, and a better principle has entered 
the sordid life of the day through the labors of these 
plain men. Whatever the prejudiced may say against 



96 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

them, the honest-minded and just will not forget their 
labors of love." 

Five great campaigns in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, 
New York, Chicago, and Boston were the beginning 
of Mr. Moody's evangelistic work in America, to which 
he gave almost all his time until his death in 1899. 
He visited all the leading cities in the United States 
and Canada, from north to south and from east to 
west, sometimes spending an entire winter in con- 
centrated work in one city. He never lost his power. 
When in 1897, two years before he was forced to lay 
down his work, he conducted a series of meetings in 
the Auditorium, the largest building in Chicago, with 
a seating capacity of six thousand, the Chicago Times- 
Herald reported of the opening meeting: 

" It made a scene without precedent. Six thou- 
sand more men and women were standing in the streets 
after the management had ordered the doors closed. 
This multitude would not accept the announcement 
that the vast hall was packed from ceiling to pit. It 
swept around the corners and in the avenues until 
traffic was blocked. The cable cars could not get past. 
... A line of policemen tried to argue, but the crowd 
would not be reasoned with. An hour before the time 
for opening there had been a stampede. Then men at 
the entrances were swept from their posts by the tide. 
The overflow waited patiently during the service, and 
a small fraction of it was able to get inside after Mr. 
Moody had finished his sermon." 

When his campaigns for the year were over, Mr. 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 97 

Moody turned, like a boy from school, to his old home 
in the little village of Northfield. His son says: 
" Nothing was more characteristic of Mr. Moody than 
his longing for retirement in the country from the 
press of his work. Though his life-work lay for the 
most part in great cities, he was born a country lad, and 
for him the ' everlasting hills ' possessed a wealth of 
meaning and a marvelous recuperative power. Some ■ 
instinct drew him back to the soil, some mysterious 
prompting impelled him to solitude, away from the 
crowds that absorbed so much of his strength; then, 
after a little respite, he would return with new 
strength and new vitality." 

One day not long after Mr. Moody had returned to 
Northfield to live, he and his younger brother drove 
past a lonely cottage on one of the mountain roads, 
far from any neighbor or town. The mother and two 
daughters of the family were sitting in the doorway 
braiding the straw hats by the sale of which they 
supported themselves and the helpless paralyzed hus- 
band and father. The father was an educated man, 
and the daughters were eager for an opportunity to 
learn how to do other things than braiding straw hats, 
but what chance was there for them, in that out-of-the- 
way place, to go to school ? Mr. Moody kept thinking 
about these girls, and other girls like them, scattered 
through the hills of New England, and talked to his 
friends about them, until in 1878 he had collected 
enough money to purchase land for a boarding-school 
where girls from families of small means could re- 



98 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

ceive a thorough Christian education. In 1879 a reci- 
tation hall large enough to accommodate one hundred 
students was built, and in 1880 ground was broken for 
the first dormitory. To-day the alumnae of North- 
field Seminary are in positions of influence all over 
the world. 

Almost before the work at Northfield Seminary was 
well under way, Mr. Moody began to plan for a similar 
school for boys. His friends responded as generously 
to his appeal on behalf of the boys as they had to 
that for the girls, and for almost thirty-five years the 
Mount Hermon School has meant to young men what 
Northfield Seminary, three miles away, has meant to 
young women. In Chicago there is another school 
established by Mr. Moody, and bearing his name — the 
Moody Bible Institute. 

One summer soon after Mr. Moody began his evan- 
gelistic campaign in America, he invited a group of 
Christian workers to come to Northfield for ten days of 
prayer and conference together. From that beginning 
thirty-five years ago have grown the six big Christian 
Conferences which every summer bring together at 
Northfield men and women, young and old, from 
almost every part of the world. 

In November of 1899, Mr. Moody was preaching 
every day to great throngs of men and women who 
crowded the Convention Hall of Kansas City. He 
had never preached with greater power, and never 
seemed more joyous in his work. 

" I have no sympathy with the idea that our best 



A MAN WITH A MESSAGE 99 

days are behind us," he declared to his audience one 
night, and chuckled as he told them how he had felt 
when he saw in the newspapers that " old Moody was 
in town." 

" Why," he said, " I am only sixty-two; I am only 
a baby in comparison with the great eternity which 
is to come ! " 

But the friends who were watching him closely saw 
that he seemed ill, and that, although he showed no 
signs of weakness while he was preaching, each service 
left him more exhausted than the one before. Finally 
they insisted that he go home, and reluctantly he left 
the campaign in the hands of others, and went back 
to his boyhood home among the hills of Northfield. 
There, on the day after Christmas, they laid him to rest 
on Round Top, in the heart of the school he had 
founded, on the hill made sacred to thousands by the 
" Round Top meetings " of the conferences he had 
established. 

In far-away China, a young father brought his 
baby son to the missionary for baptism, and asked that 
the little boy be given the name " Moo Dee." The 
missionary had never heard a Chinese name like that, 
and after the baptism questioned the father about its 
origin. 

" I have heard of your man of God, Moody," the 
father told him. " In our dialect Moo means love, and 
Dee, God. I would have my child, too, love God." 



A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 



How I long to live a life like Christ's, full of sacrifice and 
love. 

— Li Bi Cu. 




LI BI CU 



A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 

When the missionary in charge of the Foochow or- 
phanage opened the door one morning, several years 
ago, she found a little bundle of rags lying beside it. 
Inside the rags was a wee baby girl, whose parents 
had felt that the burden of another girl-child was too 
much for them to carry. So the missionary took the 
baby into the orphanage, and kept her there until she 
had grown up into a strong, educated, Christian 
young woman. Then she married Mr. Li, a graduate 
of the theological school of Foochow, and went with 
him into a lonely little mountain village, where there 
was a tiny Methodist church. While they were work- 
ing in this village their first child was born, a baby 
girl, little Bi Cu, who was not left on any one else's 
doorstep, but was welcomed with a feast of rejoicing 
to which all the church-members were invited ; for she 
had come to a Christian home where baby girls were 
as dearly loved as little sons. 

As soon as Li Bi Cu was old enough she was sent 
to the boarding-school for girls at Hinghwa, and 
while she was there did such good work that her mis- 
sionary friends wished that she might have a chance 
for further study. So when Mrs. Brewster was going 
back to America on her furlough she wrote to friends 



102 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

asking whether money for Li Bi Cu's education could 
be provided if she were to bring her home with her. 
A cablegram brought the answer, " Yes," and when 
Mrs. Brewster landed in America in May of 1897, Li 
Bi Cu was with her. 

With no knowledge of the English language, and 
very little preparation in the subjects which were 
a prerequisite to the medical course which she planned 
to take, Li Bi Cu began at the very beginning in the 
primary classes of the public school at Herkimer, New 
York. She worked untiringly, through term time and 
vacation time, and took the two years' course in Folts 
Mission Institute after leaving the public school. In 
the autumn of 1901, four years after her arrival in 
America, she was ready to enter the Woman's Medi- 
cal College of Philadelphia. The work here was not 
easy, but Li Bi Cu was a faithful student. Her interne 
work often took her into the most unpleasant sections 
of the city, where it was hard for an American woman 
to work, and doubly so for a Chinese. But she never 
shrank from any test, nor asked that she should be 
treated in any different way from the other students 
because of the disadvantages under which she worked 
as a foreigner. 

While in the medical college Li Bi Cu came in con- 
tact with the type of student who refuses to believe 
anything which cannot be proved by a scientific for- 
mula. Some of them told her that the religion which 
her parents and the missionaries had taught her was 
no longer believed by any intelligent person in Amer- 



A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 103 

ica, but was simply an old tradition which educated 
people did not accept. To be told this by students 
who had been born and brought up in a Christian coun- 
try was a severe trial for this little Chinese girl, so far 
away from her family and her teachers. But she faced 
her struggle quietly. One of the student secretaries 
of the National Young Women's Christian Association 
of America was making a visit to the medical college 
about this time, and to her Li Bi Cu came with her 
story of what some of the students had been saying 
to her. 

" Do you think that what they said was true? " the 
secretary asked her. 

" I thought I would wait until you came," Li Bi Cu 
answered. " You know students. You will tell me 
the. truth." 

" But what did you think about it yourself ? " 

" I thought, I will watch those students," Li Bi Cu 
replied. " I will see what they have to give me that 
my missionaries have not given me." 

" And what did you find? " 

" They have nothing to give," was Li Bi Cu's ver- 
dict. She had tested her faith by her Master's own 
standard. By their fruits she had known. 

Dr. Li graduated from the Woman's Medical Col- 
lege with high honors in 1905, and returned to China 
in September of that year. Before she left America 
she was received by President Roosevelt, who extended 
special courtesies to her, and talked with her of her 
plans for work in China. She treated her first patient 



I0 4 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

even before she reached the coast; for on the way to 
San Francisco the train on which she was traveling 
ran over a Russian track laborer, seriously injuring 
him. He was carried into the baggage car, and there 
Dr. Li stopped the violent hemorrhage from which 
he was suffering, and made him as comfortable as pos- 
sible until the train reached a station from which he 
could be taken to a hospital. 

Dr. Li had been away from China for over eight 
years when she returned, and the joy of her home- 
coming is the dominant note of the first letter sent 
back to America : 

" I was indeed happy when the little steam launch 
landed at Foochow. My father came about eighteen 
miles to meet me. He did not look a day older to me. 
Of course we began to talk our native language at once, 
but my tongue would not twist properly. How my 
father did laugh ! By the time we got to the end of the 
eighteen miles I was able to speak a little better. My 
dear mother was at the girls' boarding-school awaiting 
me. She stood at the door nearly all the morning wait- 
ing for me. I cannot tell you how I felt. I only knew 
I was happy. 

" I was in about two hours when many people came 
to see me, for Miss Bonafield had planned a reception 
for me. We had a lovely time together. Several of 
the missionaries sang and played. I enjoyed every 
part except the part I took. They asked me to speak 
a few words. I do not think I was ever so frightened 



A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 105 

as I was at that time, because they hardly gave me time 
to collect my thoughts. 

" I spent a week in Foochow to have my ancient 
style changed. I told my friends that it is a pity we 
do not publish a Delineator in China, so that those who 
return from other countries may not be so noticeable 
on the streets." 

During the few days which Dr. Li spent in Foochow 
she not only had her " ancient style changed " but also 
improved the opportunity of visiting the hospitals of 
the city, that she might see how hospitals in the climate 
of southern China were constructed and cared for. She 
and her parents also made a visit to Ngu Cheng, a com- 
paratively new station of the mission, where it was 
proposed that the young physician should carry on 
medical work. There she was greeted enthusiastically 
by the firing of hundreds of firecrackers. After a 
short stay, which was however long enough to impress 
her with the need of medical work there, she went to 
Hinghwa. Her own words shall tell of her return to 
her home city : 

" We had a complete family reunion. The people 
there met me with banners, firecrackers, and music. I 
felt very strange to have such a demonstration. I 
had hoped to get into the city quietly, but I could not 
help it. There was a very large crowd because the 
Hinghwa Conference was in session. My dear brothers 
and sisters have grown much. My youngest sister, 
whom I have never seen, went about a mile with others 
to meet me. As soon as she saw me she ran to meet 



106 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

me and came into my [sedan] chair. She is only five 
years old, and she is just as sweet as she can be. My 
oldest brother prepared a feast for us, so we had a very 
happy reunion." 

After eight years' absence from her native land, Dr. 
Li found that she had almost forgotten how much 
need there was. Had she needed a further incentive 
to her work as a physician, the constant appeal made to 
her sympathetic heart by the suffering all about her 
would have supplied it. 

" Oh, dear Mrs. S ," she wrote to a friend, a 

few weeks after her return, " I did not know half about 
China when I was in America. The condition is worse 
than I thought." In another letter written about the 
same time, she said, " I cannot tell you how I felt when 
I stepped into a sedan-chair. I was so sad and so sorry 
for my fellow men who had to carry me. I wished I 
were only ten pounds then, so that they might not have 
to carry such a load. The streets seem narrower than 
when I left home, but I suppose it is because I have 
seen wider ones and cleaner ones since. I never saw 
so many people on the streets as I saw in Foochow. 
That day I saw a blind woman and a child who were 
leading each other. How my heart ached for them. 
They were begging at every store, but they were being 
knocked about by the crowd." 

Dr. Li was appointed to Ngu Cheng at the Hinghwa 
Conference, and after a very brief stay with the family 
from which she had been so long separated, she eagerly 
began her work there. " My stay at home is short," 



A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 107 

she admitted, " but I feel that I must go and see about 
the building at once. The people will be glad to work 
until Chinese New Year, then they will want to stop, 
so I can come home and visit with my people at that 
time." 

One of her letters gives a glimpse of her impres- 
sions of Ngu Cheng: " Ngu Cheng is not very large 
itself, but there are numberless villages within our 
reach. The place is near the ocean and therefore very 
windy. The hills are destitute of trees, but there are 
many huge rocks. The fields are wide and very 
abundant, but the earth is not fertile, so they do not 
give good increase, consequently the people are miser- 
ably poor. These people have very little education of 
any kind, most of them have none." 

Dr. Li rented a Chinese house to serve until the 
new hospital building could be erected, and began 
work at once. Ngu Cheng was not an easy 
place in which to work. The missionary work 
was comparatively new; the city was too far 
away from any large center to have been touched 
and enlightened by foreign influence; and the 
poverty and ignorance of the people made work for 
them very difficult. In her first annual report Dr. Li 
admitted : " When I first came there was cause for 
discouragement ; for there were few patients and they 
expected to be healed after the first dose. When called 
to their homes one is sure to see a dying case, or one 
which is given up as hopeless by their own doctors." 
Yet she soon gained the confidence of the people, and 



108 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

in her first five months of work eight hundred patients 
were treated. 

For her first year's work she reported 2,905 patients 
in the dispensary, 143 visits, and 150 ward patients, 
with one death in the hospital, that of a child who 
was in the last stages of disease and exhaustion when 
brought there. " This is only the experimental year," 
she said, " so I hope next year the work will be more 
successful." But the verdict of her coworkers was : 
'• Her fitness and adaptability are a delight to her mis- 
sionary friends, while they greatly rejoice over her 
influence in evangelistic efforts." 

Of this phase of her work Dr. Li wrote at this time : 
" The hospital patients have a very good opportunity to 
learn about Christ. Many of them have come to believe 
in our God, and have destroyed the idols. Several of 
the patients have unbound their feet. If there were 
more rooms I could have taken many more. I had 
to send away some patients at times, because the hos- 
pital was too crowded. Two whole families were 
brought to Christ as the result of our out calls." 

Dr. Li's new hospital building was completed dur- 
ing the summer of 1907, and the dispensary was moved 
Into it in August. " It was astonishing to see how 
quickly the news spread," Dr. Li reported. " The first 
few days there were over thirty cases daily, and since 
then hardly ever less than twenty. I wish you could 
see the surprised look of the many people who pass in 
and out each day. They say, ' This is heaven ! ' Poor 
people ! It must be a heaven in contrast with their own 



A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 109 

surroundings. Many have said, ' Just to live in these 
rooms is enough to make one well, without any medi- 
cine.' " 

In another letter, written at about the same time, 
she says : " We had a hard time to keep the crowd out 
until we were ready to show them the house. They 
said the foreigners must be very rich to build such a 
house for the sick. They have never seen so many 
pretty things before, and most of them have only one 
set of new bedding all their lives, and that is when 
they are married. One of our rules is that every 
one must take a bath before getting into bed. I thought 
every one would object to such procedure, but very 
few objected to it. Before they came they were afraid 
of getting lonely here, but most of them hated to 
leave us." 

The interest which the people took in the work of the 
hospital was a great joy to Dr. Li, and she especially 
appreciated the gift which the preachers and teachers 
of Ngu Cheng made toward the furnishings of the 
building. " The preachers and teachers are very en- 
thusiastic, and not long ago took up a collection for 
the hospital," a letter reads. " What do you suppose 
was the amount? They gave $254 Mexican; 1 and it 
was not so much the money they gave, although it was 
more than I expected, but the spirit of it. It was a 
free-will offering. It is a great deal for them to give ; 
as the preachers get only $5 Mexican a month, and the 
teachers one dollar less. Since everything is going up 
J The Mexican dollar has a value of about forty-four cents. 



no COMRADES IN SERVICE 

in price, they have to deny themselves a great deal to 
give." 

The thirtieth of October, 1907, was the day set for 
the dedication of the new building. Dr. Li shall tell 
the story of the day's exercises : " In the morning of 
that eventful day about twelve preachers came with 
music, firecrackers, banner, and a large tablet. The 
border of the tablet is green and gilt, and the center is 
painted red with four large gold characters in it. The 
characters mean ' Life to Men and Charity to the 
World.' They hung that on our chapel wall. We 
invited them to our dining-room to take tea and four 
kinds of Chinese cake. They seemed to enjoy it very 
much. They admired our beautiful hospital, and they 
said it is the best building in the village. The formal 
dedication took place in the afternoon. We began the 
services with a grand song. After another song by the 
girls, Mrs. Bashford gave a very inspiring address. 
Bishop Bashford gave a little address, followed by the 
sacred service. How fervently did the bishop pray for 
this place." And the young physician added : " While 
the bishop was dedicating the house to God, I dedicated 
my life anew. How I do long to live a life like Christ's, 
full of sacrifice and love." 

With her splendid new hospital as a center Dr. Li 
is carrying on a sorely-needed and ever-growing work. 
The waiting-room in her dispensary is usually crowded, 
her hospital wards almost always full, the calls from 
patients too ill to come to her are constant. The 
growth of the work soon made it necessary for Dr. 



A BELOVED PHYSICIAN in 

Li to have help, and in addition to the care of her pa- 
tients she has undertaken the responsibility of training 
nurses to work with her. Whenever the pressure of 
the work in Ngu Cheng will permit it, she goes out 
into the near-by country to try to help the sick folk in 
the villages and towns where there are no doctors. 
" We were very sorry not to be able to spend more 
than a day in a place/' she wrote after one of these 
trips. " So many of the people had to be sent away. 
If we could have stayed longer we could have seen 
more than a thousand; as it was we saw about seven 
hundred patients. It was hard to realize how many 
suffering ones there are whose sufferings are never re- 
lieved. Many of those whom we treated ought to come 
to our hospital, but they cannot afford to hire chairs 
to bring them." 

Dr. Li's constant contact with disease and poverty 
has never rendered her in the least callous to them. 
Her recent letters are as full of expressions of pain at 
the suffering all about her as were the early ones when, 
after her long stay in America, the misery of life in a 
non-Christian country came to her with almost as much 
vividness as if she had never seen it before. The most 
helpless and hopeless people always make the strongest 
appeal to her. One day some beggars came to her dis- 
pensary door, with a little blind girl about eight years 
old, whom they were taking about with them in order 
to rouse people's sympathy and induce them to give. 
" When I saw this little child," Dr. Li wrote to a 
friend, " and saw that her eyes were beyond help, I 



ii2 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

made up my mind to buy her. At first they were not 
willing to sell her, but finally they were willing." At 
the time of the annual conference Dr. Li took the little 
girl with her to Foochow, and put her in the mission 
school for blind children, hoping that there she would 
forget the wretchedness of the bitterly hard life she 
had been leading. 

In 1912 Dr. Li was appointed an official representa- 
tive of the Foochow Conference to the General Con- 
ference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, which was 
held in Minneapolis. It was the first time a Chinese 
woman had ever crossed the ocean as a delegate to the 
General Conference, and Dr. Li's father, who was the 
delegate from the Hinghwa Conference, was im- 
mensely proud of the splendid impression his daugh- 
ter made. The two spoke at the same session of the 
Conference, the daughter pleading especially for the 
women of her country. " I do want to leave a message 
with you all this morning," she said, " I think you know 
that the womanhood of China has been very low for 
several thousand years, and therefore, now that the new 
republic is going to be formed, we want to have the 
womanhood of China lifted up as high as the woman- 
hood of your nation. I think that no nation can help 
the women of China as the United States through the 
work of missionaries in China ; so now I want to ask 
you that, when you go home, you talk to the women 
in your churches and ask them to send more mission- 
aries to China to help us lift the womanhood of China 
so that before long the two great republics will unite 



A BELOVED PHYSICIAN 113: 

together in this work and be a power for Jesus Christ 
to elevate the womanhood of the world." 

During this second stay in America Dr. Li told the 
story of her people and their need to a great many 
audiences, and then went back to help to meet that need 
with renewed strength and energy. Her life-work 
for these people has only begun, but surely it is 
a splendid beginning. She has treated thousands of 
patients during every year of her work, and has been 
successful in dealing with the most difficult cases. Nor 
has she ever lost her courage and enthusiasm, though 
there have been difficulties in the work at Ngu Cheng 
which many medical missionaries in other stations 
have not had to meet. 

When Dr. Li went there the people had been almost 
untouched by foreign influences of any sort, and were 
suspicious of all things foreign. This difficulty she is 
rapidly overcoming, for her loving desire to help them 
and her skill in doing so have won their confidence. 
Their poverty, while making their need all the greater, 
has added to the difficulties of the work; for disease 
is hard to conquer when it has to be combated in 
houses the squalor and unhygienic conditions of which 
beggar description. Moreover, the patients cannot 
afford to buy the nourishing food needed to build up 
strength. Yet Dr. Li has relieved and cured hosts 
of sufferers yearly and her well-cared-for hospital is a 
constant object-lesson. 

Those whose whole energy is spent in a struggle just 
to live have no time for education, and little interest in 



ii 4 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

anything outside of their own immediate needs. With 
all the devotion with which she is pouring out her life 
for them, the young physician can hardly find real 
companionship among the people of Ngu Cheng, and 
must have been hungry many times for the opportuni- 
ties of social intercourse which workers in more central 
places enjoy. "It is hard to get any one to come to 
help us in this country place. Our girls love pleasures 
when they have any education at all. They do not like 
to come here where they do not see anything new. In 
Foochow there are lectures on reforms and other things 
of interest that they can go to hear. Here we have 
never heard a lecture these four years." But she has 
never turned back for discouragement or loneliness. 
" Nevertheless these people must be saved too," she 
says. 

Her eight years in America may well have taught her 
to appreciate the advantages which life in a large city 
affords, even more keenly than do the girls who have 
had a less broad outlook. Yet she is cheerfully and 
whole-heartedly giving her life, and all the powers 
which her opportunities for study and travel have given 
her, to the needy people in and about Ngu Cheng, 
counting it a joy and blessed opportunity thus to follow 
in the footsteps of him who came not to be ministered 
unto, but to minister. 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 



When men are regenerated of the spirit, . . . live in families 
under divine ordinance, there is salvation for the man, the family, 
the tribe, the race. 

— Thomas Crosby. 




THOMAS CROSBY 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 

When the Hudson Bay Company's little steamer 
Otter left the port of Bella Bella on a certain journey 
up the north coast of the Pacific, some forty years 
and more ago, a stout little Indian canoe was bob- 
bing dizzily up and down in its wake. Nobody 
seemed to know why the empty canoe was being towed 
by the Otter, and even the questions of one of the 
only two cabin passengers which the little steamer 
boasted succeeded merely in getting the twinkling- 
eyed old captain to remark, " You take care of your 
good wife and you will find out soon enough what 
the canoe is for." When Chatham Sound was reached 
the curious one did find out; for the Otter slowed 
down, the canoe was drawn up alongside, and he and 
his young wife, with an old Indian woman who was 
to act as steersman, were lowered into it, and told 
that steady paddling would soon cover the eight or 
ten miles of water between them and Fort Simpson. 1 
Thus, amid the cheers and good wishes of captain 
and crew and the kindly miners who had been their 
fellow travelers on the Otter, Thomas Crosby and his 
bride paddled into the big Indian village of Fort Simp- 
son, where they were to start a Christian mission. 

When, less than a week later, the Otter passed Fort 

1 On the British Columbia coast. 

115 



n6 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

Simpson again on its journey back to Victoria, the 
captain was given an order for the lumber needed for 
a church building for the new mission. The first 
thing Thomas Crosby had done was to call a meet- 
ing of all the Indians in the house of Chief Scow- 
Gate. There, speaking through an interpreter, he 
had told them that he and his wife had come to live 
among them, to preach the gospel, and to teach them, 
and that the first thing needed was a church building 
in which they could all come together. What could 
they give toward the new church, he asked? The 
minute he finished speaking his audience arose almost 
in a body and departed in haste. 

This unexpected result of his first speech to his 
people was not a little disconcerting to the young 
missionary, but his interpreter assured him that he 
thought they would soon come back, and presently 
they did, laden with Hudson Bay trading blankets, 
furs, muskets — anything which could be turned into 
money for the new church. With some help from the 
little company of white people who lived at Fort 
Simpson the subscriptions amounted to a thousand 
dollars. But money was not all the Indians of Fort 
Simpson gave for their new church. While they 
waited for the schooner which was bringing the logs, 
they were busy clearing the ground, and going into 
the woods to get timber. There was no wharf at Fort 
Simpson, and when at last the logs came, it was no 
small task to get them to land, for they had to be 
thrown overboard, rafted alongside the ship, and 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 117 

towed ashore. Then, when they were at last on land, 
there were no horses or oxen to drag them up the 
hill, but each heavy, water-soaked log had to be car- 
ried on men's shoulders. It was the Indians too, who, 
under the missionaries' direction, hewed the logs and 
whipsawed them and turned them into shingles. Small 
wonder that they loved the little church with its 
upward-pointing spire, and that they turned literally 
by the hundreds, men, women, and little children, to 
the God for whose worship they had erected it. And, 
when Sundays found them far away from their little 
church home, they did not forget its services. Two or 
three times a. Sunday, when they were off in fishing 
or logging camps, they would gather together for 
service, using some of the Bible texts which they had 
memorized, and as much of the sermons connected 
with them as they could remember. One little group 
of shipwrecked Indians, clinging to a precarious raft 
of the thwarts and withes of a broken canoe, held 
three services on Sunday even as they were making 
desperate efforts, with one paddle and a broken oar, 
to get to land. " The eyes of the Lord are in every 
place," was one of the texts in which the little ship- 
wrecked band found comfort and courage. 

The church and the mission house which the In- 
dians had helped to build led, as Mr. Crosby had 
hoped they would, to a realization of the squalor and 
discomfort of the old one-roomed, mud-floored, win- 
dowless lodges, in which four and five Indian families 
were herded together. Many of the Christian Indians 



n8 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

at once began to save all that they could spare from 
their scanty earnings in order to build little separate 
houses of three or four rooms each. The missionary 
helped them to measure plots of land and to draw 
up plans for their new homes, and then taught them 
how to build them from the first foundation-stone to 
the last shingle on the roof. As the neat little houses 
went up one after another the irregular ill-kept trails 
which were Fort Simpson's only thoroughfares began 
to seem as unsatisfactory as the old lodges, and here 
again Thomas Crosby came to the rescue. He showed 
the Indians how to lay out and build good roads ; and 
under his direction, too, they put up the bridges which 
had long been needed. In an almost unbelievably 
short time after the little canoe had landed Thomas 
Crosby and his wife in Fort Simpson it was trans- 
formed from an unsightly and uncleanly village into 
a neat and orderly little town of attractive homes. 
Crosby enlisted some of the surplus energy of the 
young men in a fire company, which became expert 
in bucket and hook-and-ladder drills and rendered 
valiant service whenever fire threatened any of the 
new buildings. Fort Simpson soon boasted a brass 
band also, which added much to all public affairs, 
and a rifle company, whose drills and parades were 
the pride of the town. Perhaps the thing which de- 
lighted Fort Simpson most, however, was the fact 
that it was the first town on the northern Pacific 
coast to publish a newspaper. Thomas Crosby taught 
his Indians how to print, and the Simpson Herald 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 119 

appeared even before Sheldon Jackson's North Star. 

Crosby was very eager to foster the interest of the 
Indians in all their accomplishments both old and 
new, and within a year after his arrival at Fort 
Simpson he instituted an industrial fair. Only a 
month was given for preparation, but beadwork, carv- 
ings, drawings, paintings, needlework, and food- 
stuffs of various kinds came pouring in from all di- 
rections, and sixty prizes were awarded. Among the 
most interesting exhibits of this first of several in- 
dustrial fairs were some little carved models of a 
steamboat, a European house, and an old-style Indian 
house. One of the features of the industrial fair in which 
the people took special pride was a class of small 
Indians who spelled word after word without making 
a single mistake, and rattled off the multiplication 
tables with breath-taking rapidity. 

Fort Simpson was a village of about a thousand 
people, and inevitably there were a thousand little 
difficulties arising constantly, but there was no justice 
of the peace nor any central council before which 
disputes could be brought for settlement. With char- 
acteristic faith and courage Thomas Crosby called to- 
gether the chiefs of the village and proposed that a 
municipal council should be organized, its duties be- 
ing to make and enforce the laws of the little com- 
munity. The idea appealed to the Indians at once, 
and a council of twenty was elected. Thomas Crosby 
Tiad exhorted them to choose the strongest and most 
influential men of the village to membership in this 



120 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

council, although he knew that on that basis several 
of the leading gamblers, the worst conjurers, and 
the fierce " dog-eaters " would be given seats in the 
little law-making body. It was a motley company of 
men that came together to make Fort Simpson's first 
laws. The meeting was opened with prayer, as all 
subsequent meetings were ; and then on the motion of 
a former conjurer a law was enacted forbidding gam- 
bling within the precincts of Fort Simpson. Next, a 
leading gambler proposed a law forbidding all con- 
juring. Other laws were passed in swift succession, 
one forbidding whisky-drinking, one providing 
against the breaking of the Sabbath, and others di- 
rected against fighting, heathen marriages, and other 
evils. All these revolutionary laws were inscribed in 
a big book, and the punishments or fines to be inflicted 
on those who violated them were set down after each. 
The council proved to be quite as efficient at en- 
forcing the laws as at making them. It appointed 
watchmen to see that its mandates were obeyed, in- 
flicted summary punishment on any who broke them, 
and in a very short time no more peaceful or law- 
abiding community than Fort Simpson could be 
found. A flag was hoisted every Sunday to remind 
both villagers and strangers that it was a day of rest 
and worship, when no canoes might either come in 
or go out unless in case of sickness or other danger. 
The Indians of Fort Simpson could never be per- 
suaded to do anything which was contrary to their 
convictions regarding what was right on Sunday, 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 121 

even when they were at the mines or salmon can- 
neries far away from the laws of their village and 
under severe pressure to do Sunday work. A com- 
pany of white men from the Cassiar mines once 
brought this report to Fort Simpson. 

" A number of your Indian boys last spring showed 
us that men can do more work in six days than they 
can in seven. When we were leaving Fort Wrangel 
we engaged a party of your Christian Indians to 
take us to the mines; another crowd of miners who 
were going engaged a crew of heathen Indians. 
They started out before we did. We soon passed 
them; and, when it came to Saturday afternoon our 
crew looked out about four o'clock for a good camp- 
ing-place. Some of our white men urged them to go 
on. They said, ' No, we are going to camp here for 
the Sabbath ! ' When they saw good camping- 
ground, they got ashore, chopped wood, and pre- 
pared for the Sabbath morning. Early they had a 
prayer-meeting; at eleven o'clock they had preach- 
ing; each man had his Bible with him, and they had 
a Bible class afterward. They had service in the 
evening also. During the day, about noon, the other 
party came along, tugging and working all day, and 
they hissed and cursed at us as they passed, calling us 
Sabbatarians. Our boys retired early for rest and 
were up bright and early the next morning. The fire 
was soon going, we had breakfast and off we started; 
and how all those boys did work! It was not long 
before we passed the fellows who had worked all day 



122 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

on Sunday, and we were in the mines a day ahead of 
them, clearly proving to us that men who regard the 
Sabbath can do more work in six days than others 
can in seven." 

The fame of quiet, orderly, well-governed Fort 
Simpson spread all along the coast, and other In- 
dians who came there to trade had unbounded faith 
in the big missionary whose suggestions and council 
had wrought such changes. One spring a company 
of the Cape Fox Indians, who had come to bring 
their fur pelts to the Hudson Bay Company's stores 
at the Fort, arrived in town at the same time as a 
company of Hyda Indians of Queen Charlotte 
Islands, who had brought some new canoes to sell. 
Now the Hydas had long been the vikings of the 
northern Pacific coast and the terror of all the other 
tribes. No one knew when a party of them might 
swoop down in the enormous canoes which they 
alone knew how to make, rob a village, seize many 
of the inhabitants as slaves, and be off again with 
lightning-like swiftness into waters where ordi- 
nary canoes could not follow. The Cape Fox Indians 
had suffered much at their hands, and when their old 
chief Kah-shakes found that some of them were at 
Fort Simpson he came to Mr. Crosby with a much 
troubled face. 

" Han-kow, Han-kow (Chief, Chief,") he began, 
" I would like to speak to you, sir. You are the great 
chief who has brought peace all along this coast; and 
I wish you, the great peace chief, would help us. You, 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 123 

sir, have seen these Hydas come here. There are some 
in town now and there is a great han-kow in the 
village from Queen Charlotte Islands. Nin-jing-wash 
is his name. I always feel when I see him that I 
should like to kill him. I feel angry at him ; and so I 
came to tell you, sir, that I hope you will make peace 
between us. It has been a long trouble. If you will 
call him up to your house I will speak to him and tell 
him my heart; I can't speak to him on the street. I 
want to speak to him in your presence, sir. Call him 
quickly, Han-kow ! " 

Nin-jing-wash was sent for, and old Kah-shakes 
told him that he did not wish to be angry, that the mis- 
sionaries had brought the light so near them that they 
ought to be at peace. But, he said, there had been 
trouble between his people and the Hydas for many 
years, and the Hydas had taken at least one of the 
Cape Fox people, a very great chief, for whom no 
atonement had ever been made. Would Nin-jing-wash 
agree to have this matter presented to the missionary 
and a council of Christian men, that a right and just 
decision might be reached? Nin-jing-wash answered 
that he was the only Hyda chief then at Fort Simpson, 
but that he would go home and bring other chiefs and 
come back in six weeks; let Kah-shakes do the same. 
Kah-shakes agreed to this, and both Indians " put their 
marks " to an agreement that the decision of the 
Christian council should be final. 

Six weeks later nine Hyda chiefs, Kah-shakes and 
several of his people, and Thomas Crosby and six 



i2 4 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

Christian Indians met together in solemn council. 
The meeting was opened with prayer, and then, after 
a brief word of explanation and introduction by Mr. 
Crosby, Nin-jing-wash rose to his feet and declared 
that all the trouble had been started by the Cape Fox 
people many years ago. Then old Kah-shakes got 
up and said : " I have not a bad heart or I should not 
have come to this God's servant to make peace. If I 
had not a good heart, I should have thought over the 
bad and have gone away and done something bad 
another time." 

The council was now well started, and for two 
days one chief after another told tales of bloody con- 
flict and butchery of men, women, and helpless chil- 
dren, until sometimes feeling rose to such a pitch that 
it seemed as if another battle would be fought there 
in the mission house. " I did not rest much those two 
nights," Thomas Crosby says, " and sometimes when 
the chiefs told their heartrending stories of terrible 
conflicts and how their people were savagely slain, 
I would rise to say a word to quell their rage or sit and 
lift my heart to God for help. Much prayer was made 
among our fellow Christians of the village during those 
days, and it was a real comfort to see how much they 
were interested in making peace between these once 
great nations of proud people." 

Finally the council decreed that the Hydas should 
pay the Foxes fifty blankets, but Thomas Crosby 
urged them to obey not only the old Indian custom 
of payment, but the Christian law of free forgiveness. 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 125 

Then Nin-jing-wash, on behalf of the Hydas rose to 
his feet and said, " My chiefs and I are willing to 
do what the good missionary chief says." Next rose 
old Kah-shakes, and with the words, " Do you think 
my heart can be bought with a few blankets ? " took 
off a fine new overcoat and handed it to Nin-jing- 
wash. Then he took his old enemy by the hand, put 
his other arm about him, turned him around three 
times, and kissed him. He then went to each of the 
other Hyda chiefs in turn, and embraced him. Every 
chief then shook hands with each of the chiefs of the 
other tribe, each man put his mark to a paper stating 
the terms of peace, and after a prayer-meeting of 
thanksgiving the council was closed. 

Thomas Crosby's heart was always going out to 
the many tribes of Indians along the coast to whom 
no missionary had gone, and again and again he would 
take a little company of Christian Indians with him 
and start out on a canoe trip lasting several days or 
even weeks. Story after story of these trips shows 
how fraught with discomfort and danger they were. 
Here is just one of them. 

" With a party of ten I started away in February, 
1876. As the weather seemed mild and favorable, 
we expected to reach Naas the same night or next 
day, but that night the weather cleared up and be- 
came frosty, with a very strong north wind. Next 
day we struggled against the storm up Portland 
Channel until it got so bad we had to camp. In the 
night it was very cold in our camp on the beach. Next 



126 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

day the wind blew terribly and the cold increased so 
that we had to move camp up into the woods and cut 
down trees to make a booth or brushhouse to shelter 
us from the wintry blast. Here we remained for sev- 
eral days until our food was all gone; and so, in the 
midst of the gale, the wind making waterspouts of 
the waves on the Inlet, we started back home, assured 
that we couldn't get up the Naas, as the river would 
be freezing over. On our return trip near a headland 
known as Ten Mile Point, in a most miraculous way 
we were saved when our mast broke away at the foot 
and came near capsizing the canoe. Had we been 
upset here we must all have been lost, for the rocks 
rose perpendicularly from the water's edge, and there 
was no way to get ashore. We recovered the sail, 
got it fixed, and on we went, the waves dashing over 
us and the spray every time forming ice on our 
covering and clothes. 

" Within ten miles of home we met Chief Seck-sake 
from Fort Simpson with twenty-one young men in a 
large canoe, plunging away bravely through the waves 
in the face of that terrible gale to take food to the 
missionary and his party. They had become con- 
vinced at home, the night before, that it was im- 
possible for us to reach Naas, so they had gone 
through the village collecting food. They had got a 
hundred dried salmon, fish grease, and other things, 
and were bent on pressing their way even to Naas 
through such a gale." 

When after a hard trip up the coast Crosby and 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 127 

his little band of fellow workers succeeded in reach- 
ing their destination, they were not always sure of 
a warm welcome. At one time, when they finally 
succeeded in reaching the town of Naas, they found all 
the people gathered together in one of the lodges. 
" Men were dancing all over the floor," the missionary 
writes, " the old conjurer's drum was going, and 
hundreds more were beating sticks on boards to keep 
time. They were covered with paint and feathers, a 
grotesque sight. They never danced promiscuously. 
When the men would sit or fall down, exhausted, the 
women would sally forth and dance, they in turn 
falling near the fire or even on it. The people would 
throw water on them to bring them to." A more un- 
promising setting for the preaching of the gospel 
could scarcely be imagined, but Thomas Crosby was 
not the man to be turned aside by difficulties. " I 
said, ' Stop! ' in a very decided voice," says he, " ' I 
want to preach to you.' I walked up and down in the 
house giving them the law as well as the gospel." It 
was only a very few weeks after that that the people 
of Naas sent an embassy to Fort Simpson, saying 
that a thousand people wanted a missionary. Could 
he not be sent soon? 

Many and many a time, however, the missionary's 
welcome was pathetically eager and heartfelt. One 
evening in a village far up the Skeena river the meet- 
ing was typical of many another service held in some 
remote little town to which the mission canoe had 
found its way. " I slipped my pack off my back and, 



128 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

Bible in hand, commenced to tell them of the wonderful 
love of God in the gift of his Son to save a lost 
world," writes the missionary. " They crowded in 
and crouched on the floor. We had no other light 
than the dying embers of the fire, which was there 
more to smoke the salmon which hung over it than 
to give light. As I spoke on, all I could see was a 
mass of faces filled with wonder and amazement. I 
continued talking for a long time, as they seemed in- 
tensely interested; but being very tired was about to 
stop, when a number with tears in their eyes said, 
' Oh, go on, do tell us more ; we never heard such a 
wonderful story; tell us more! ' Some time after this 
we closed the service, glad that we had come so far 
to tell them of a Savior's love." 

If these long and dangerous trips meant danger 
to the missionary they meant no less of sacrifice to 
the missionary's wife who stayed behind at Fort Simp- 
son, keenly aware of the dangers her husband might 
be facing, but with little time for worry, since all the 
services at Fort Simpson were often left in her 
hands during his absence, in addition to her teach- 
ing and the care of several active little Crosbys. 
Some of the darkest hours of her life she passed 
through alone, unable to reach her husband or send 
him any word. At one time after he had been away 
for less than three weeks he was met, when about one 
hundred and fifty miles from home, by a canoe flying 
a little black flag. "What kind of a flag is that?" 
the missionary asked. " Oh, it is for you, sir," they 



A PACIFIC PIONEER 129 

told him pityingly. " Two of your children are dead 
and buried." It did not seem possible! Less than 
three weeks before the children had been perfectly 
well. But there was no mistake. When Thomas 
Crosby reached his home he found that the tiny baby 
and little three-year-old Winifred were gone, and the 
third little girl and her mother lay desperately ill 
with diphtheria. There was no doctor in Fort Simp- 
son, and the two babies had gone in three days. The 
older child finally recovered, but the mother lay at 
death's door for months, and not for a year and 3 
half were they sure that they could keep her. The 
lack of a physician was one of the severest trials 
these pioneer missionaries had to bear, for not until 
long after other forms of missionary work were well 
under way was medical work attempted. Urgent 
petitions were sent to the board, however, both mis- 
sionaries and Indians promising to contribute to the 
support of medical work, and now there are missionary 
physicians all along the coast. 

When, because of advancing years and ill health, 
Thomas Crosby reluctantly left his work among the 
Indians, after almost fifty years spent in their service, 
a friend wrote : " Beginning when paganism was ram- 
pant and when but little had been done for the heathen 
Indian, he has seen the work advance and darkness 
recede before the dawning light, until to-day churches 
and schools under Christian control are found in al- 
most every Indian village and white settlement on 
the coast." 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 



I am their servant in the field. 

— Samuel Adjai Crowther. 




SAMUEL ADJAI CROWTHER 



ft BISHOP OF THE NIGER 

One sunny morning many years ago, when the peo- 
ple in the little town of Oshogun, in West Africa, were 
quietly preparing their breakfasts, sudden word came 
that the Eyo Mohammedans were preparing to attack 
the town, capture the inhabitants, and sell them as 
slaves. Before the startled people had time to defend 
themselves their enemies were upon them. A few min- 
utes later the women, with their little black children, 
were fleeing to the jungles, while the men made a last 
desperate effort to drive back trie Mohammedans. 
Among those who tried to find a hiding-place in the 
shrubs and grasses of the jungle was Adjai, a boy 
about fourteen years old. But he and his mother and 
two sisters, one of them a tiny baby only a few weeks 
old, had not gone far before they were caught by the 
rope nooses of their enemies and led away with other 
captives to the town of Iseh'i, which lay at a distance 
of some miles. 

When they arrived here, Adjai and the older little 
sister were separated from their mother and from 
each other. The mother and baby were given to the 
chief of the town of Dahdah, and the two older chil- 
dren were assigned to different people in the town of 
Iseh'i. After about two months Adjai was taken by 

131 



i 3 2 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

his master to Dahdah, and there was allowed to see 
his mother and the baby often, but the older sister 
he did not see again. 

One evening, after he had been in Dahdah for 
about three months, he and several other captives were 
seized and chained and started on their way to a 
market-town. After traveling for several days they 
reached this town, and Adjai was sold to a Moham- 
medan woman who took him to another part of the 
country where a language was spoken which he could 
not understand. He became so unhappy that he tried 
several times to strangle himself, but he never got 
quite enough courage to pull the rope so tight as to 
hurt himself seriously. He became so sick and miser- 
able however that his mistress sold him, and one morn- 
ing he set out with his new owner for a region still 
more distant from his home. He says that they al- 
ways started on their travels before dawn, while it 
was still dark, in order that the slaves might not see 
where they were going and find their way back again. 
His new owner traded him before long for rum and 
tobacco ; the next owner soon sold him to another, and 
for several months he was passed from hand to hand 
until he reached a trading town on the coast, where he 
was sold to some Portuguese slave-traders. 

By this time, though he was still a boy, he had be- 
come, he says, " a veteran in slavery," and was so 
hopeless and dejected that nothing made much im- 
pression on him. But these strange white men, the 
first he had seen, did frighten him, and the sight of 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 133 

so much water was also terrifying, for he had never 
before seen the sea or even a large river. His Portu- 
guese owners put an iron fetter on the neck of each of 
their slaves, thrust a long heavy chain through each of 
these fetters and fastened the chains at both ends with 
a heavy padlock. Men and boys were chained together, 
and thrust into a room with no windows and only one 
door which was kept locked. The men, being stronger 
than the boys, would draw the chain in such a way 
as to ease themselves of its weight, with the result 
that the fetters were pressed against the necks of the 
boys so heavily that they were almost suffocated, and 
their necks were a mass of bruises. But at last their 
owner had secured enough slaves to satisfy him, and 
one hundred and eighty-seven of them were loaded 
into the hold of a Portuguese steamer. At first Adjai 
was utterly miserable from fright and seasickness, but 
his troubles were almost over, for the very day on 
which the ship set sail it was captured by two British 
men-of-war. These new white men with their long 
swords were very alarming sights to the wonder- 
ing little black boys. They soon learned, however, 
that they had at last fallen into the hands of friends, 
and when they understood that they were not to be 
kept in the hold, but allowed the freedom of the boat, 
and that they might have all the food they wished, 
they became very much at home and very happy. For 
two months and. a half Adjai lived on H.M.S. 
Myrmidon, while Captain Leeke looked for other slave- 



134 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

ships, and at the end of that time was taken to Sierra 
Leone, where he was put in the care of some English 
missionaries. 

Here he was taught to read and write, and learned 
the trade of a carpenter. Here too he became a Chris- 
tian and was baptized on December n, 1825, receiving 
the name, Samuel Adjai Crowther. He was the first 
student to be enrolled in the Fourah Bay College, which 
was established by the Church Missionary Society of 
England for the purpose of training young Africans 
to be missionaries to their own people. The principal 
of the college describes this first pupil as " a lad of 
uncommon ability, steady conduct, a thirst for knowl- 
edge, and indefatigable industry." After his gradua- 
tion he was invited to return to the college as a tutor, 
and while he was filling this position went on study- 
ing during his leisure hours, and also worked as an 
assistant to one of the missionaries. While he was in 
college he was married to a young woman who was 
teaching the little black folks at Sierra Leone. She 
too had been captured by the slave-traders of West 
Africa and rescued by a British war-ship, and she and 
Adjai had been good friends ever since he had been 
brought to Sierra Leone. They both came from the 
same section of Africa and spoke the same dialect, and 
their marriage was a very happy one. 

In 1 84 1, the British government sent an expedition 
up the Niger river in the hope of persuading the na- 
tive chiefs to promise that the slave-trade would be 
abolished and that commercial relations with Great 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 135 

Britain would be established. When the officers of the 
Church Missionary Society learned of this enterprise, 
they asked that two of their representatives might 
go up the river with the members of the expedition in 
order to find out whether it would be possible to estab- 
lish a mission station in that region. This request was 
granted, and the young tutor of Fourah Bay College 
was given the honor of going on that famous expedi- 
tion. Only a handful of those who began the trip were 
left when the ships reached the mouth of the Niger on 
their way back. Jungle fever had ended the life of 
one after another, and it had been impossible for 
the expedition to accomplish all that had been hoped. 
But it had firmly established one fact in the minds of 
the Church Missionary Society leaders. They must 
emphasize the training of African missionaries to their 
own people, for they had seen that there were parts of 
Africa in which white men could not live and keep 
their health. 

Samuel Crowther's missionary friends and his com- 
panions on the expedition up the Niger wrote enthusi- 
astic letters to England about him, telling of his ability, 
his modesty, and his earnestness, and suggesting that 
he be summoned to England to be ordained as a clergy- 
man of full rank in the Church of England. The 
Church Missionary Society felt sure that this sugges- 
tion was a wise one, and in September, 1842, the young 
man landed in the country whose seamen had years 
ago rescued him from the slave-ship. During the 
journey to England he had used his leisure time to 



i 3 6 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

prepare a grammar and dictionary of the Yoruba lan- 
guage. 

He had been a diligent student of Latin and Greek 
while he was teaching at Fourah Bay College, and the 
committee who examined him found that a very few 
months of study would prepare him for ordination. 
He had this study at Islington Church College, and 
took his examination under Dr. Schofield, Professor 
of Greek at Cambridge. Dr. Schofield was among 
those who held the theory that the mind of a Negro is 
incapable of logical reasoning, but after examining 
Samuel Crowther he said to the principal of the col- 
lege: 

" I should like, with your permission, to take young 
Crowther's answers to those Paley questions back with 
me to Cambridge and there read a few of them to 
certain of my friends. If after hearing the young 
African's answers, they still contend that he does not 
possess a logical faculty, they will tempt us to question 
whether they do not lack certain other faculties of 
at least equal importance, such as common fairness of 
judgment and Christian candor.'* 

After his ordination Mr. Crowther returned at once 
to Africa, eager to begin the work of a Christian mis- 
sionary to his people. He spent the days on the ocean 
in beginning a translation of the Bible into the Yoruba 
language. The native Christians were eagerly await- 
ing him, for they felt that a new day was dawning for 
Africa in the coming to them of this first ordained 
Christian minister of their own race. They referred 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 137 

to him lovingly as " our black minister," and crowded 
to hear him whenever he preached. 

Upon reaching Africa he stayed for a time in Free- 
town, but was soon ready to go with a little company 
of English missionaries to establish a Christian mission 
station at Abeokuta, where a group of West Africans 
who had been captured as slaves but had succeeded 
in escaping had formed a prosperous colony. After a 
most difficult journey, lasting several weeks, Abeokuta 
was reached, and the missionary party was cordially 
welcomed by Sagbua, the chief of the colony. The town 
crier was sent out to summon a public meeting, and 
when all the people were gathered together, Mr. Crow- 
ther addressed them in their own language, telling them 
why the missionaries had come, and what they hoped 
to do. His audience responded most enthusiastically 
and every one present promised a generous gift for 
the church building. Work on the new structure was 
begun almost at once, and the missionaries had so 
many offers of help that they could not possibly use 
all the eager applicants. But those who could not have 
part in the actual work stood by and cheered on the 
workers with their admiring comments. 

The work at Abeokuta grew rapidly, and both Mr. 
Crowther and his wife gave their whole time and 
energy to it for some years. Not long after they came 
there, Mr. Crowther learned that the mother from 
whom he had been separated nearly twenty-five 
years before, was living with a sister in a near-by 
town. He sent for them at once, and although his 



138 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

sister could not believe that this message was really 
from her brother, the mother, with an older son, Mr. 
Crowther's half-brother, immediately set out for 
Abeokuta. 

" She could not believe her own eyes," Mr. Crowther 
wrote in his diary. " We grasped one another, looking 
at one another in silence and great astonishment, while 
the big tears rolled down her emaciated cheeks. She 
trembled as she held me by the hand and called me by 
the familiar names which I well remember I used to 
be called by my grandmother, who has since died in 
slavery. We could not say much, but sat still, casting 
many an affectionate look toward each other, a look 
which violence and oppression had long checked, an 
affection which twenty-five years had not extin- 
guished." 

His mother was Mr. Crowther's first Christian con- 
vert at Abeokuta, and was baptized by him. She came 
to live with him, although he told her that his work 
would often cause him to be away from home for long 
periods of time. But she said : 

' You are no longer my son, but the servant of 
God, whose work you must attend to without any 
anxiety for me. It is enough that I am permitted to 
see you once more in this world ! " 

Even when she was very ill and knew that she could 
not recover, she would not permit any word of her ill- 
ness to be sent to her son, lest he be made anxious and 
his work suffer. 

After working in Abeokuta for five years Mr. Crow- 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 139 

ther made another short visit to England. He had an 
interview with Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secre- 
tary, in which he explained the political situation in 
West Africa, and laid especial emphasis on the damage 
being done to commerce and civilization by the king 
of Dahomey, a native chief who was an unscrupulous 
slave-trader and had caused the peaceful people of 
Abeokuta much trouble. Lord Palmerston thanked 
him in a letter for " the important and interesting in- 
formation " he had given, and a few days later Mr. 
Crowther was asked to go to Windsor Castle to tell 
the Prince Consort what he had told the Foreign Sec- 
retary. Mr. Crowther's children used to listen with 
breathless interest to their father's story of his experi- 
ence that afternoon. 

" On our arrival there, Prince Albert was not in," 
he used to tell them. " While we were waiting in a 
drawing-room I could not help looking round at the 
magnificence of the room glittering with gold, the 
carpet, chairs, and other furniture, all brilliant. While 
in this state of mind the door was opened and I saw 
a lady gorgeously dressed, with a long train, step 
gracefully in. I thought she was the Queen. I rose 
at once and was ready to kneel and pay my obeisance, 
but she simply bowed to us, said not a word, took 
something from the mantelpiece and retired. After 
she left Lord Russell told me that she was one of the 
ladies-in-waiting. 

" ' Well ! ' I said to myself, ' if a lady-in-waiting is 
so superbly dressed, what will be the dress of the Queen 



J 4o COMRADES IN SERVICE 

herself ? ' Soon we were invited to an upper drawing- 
room more richly furnished than the first. Here we 
met Prince Albert standing by a writing-table. Lord 
Russell made obeisance and introduced me, and I 
made obeisance. A few words of introductory re- 
marks led to conversation about West Africa, and 
Abeokuta in particular. . . . About this time a lady 
came in, simply dressed, and the Prince, looking be- 
hind him, introduced her to Lord Russell, but in so 
quick a way that I could not catch the sound. This 
lady and the Prince turned towards the map to find 
Abeokuta and Sierra Leone, where the slaves are 
liberated. ... On inquiry I gave them the history of 
how I was caught and sold, to which all of them 
listened with breathless attention. It was getting dark, 
a lamp was gotten and the Prince was anxious to find 
and define the relative position of the different places on 
the map, especially Lagos, which was the principal sea- 
port from which Yoruba slaves were shipped; and 
when the Prince wanted to open the Blue Book map 
wider, it blew the lamp out altogether, and there was a 
burst of laughter from the Prince, the lady, and Lord 
Russell. The Prince then said, 

Will your Majesty kindly bring us a candle from 
the mantelpiece?' On hearing this I became aware 
of the person before whom I was all the time. I trem- 
bled from head to foot, and could not open my mouth 
to answer the questions that followed. Lord Russell 
and the Prince told me not to be frightened, and the 
smiles on the face of the good Queen assured me 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 141 

that she was not angry at the liberty I took in speak- 
ing so freely before her, and so my fears subsided. 
. . , Lord Russell then mentioned my translations into 
the Yoruba language, and I repeated the Lord's 
Prayer in the Yoruba, which the Queen said was a 
soft and melodious language. . . . After these ques- 
tions she withdrew, with a marked farewell gesture." 

Before leaving England Mr. Crowther spoke to a 
large audience of students of Cambridge University, 
appealing to them to help Africa. " St. Paul saw in a 
vision a man of Macedonia," he reminded them, " who 
prayed him to come over to his assistance. But it is 
no vision that you see now — it is a real man of Africa 
that stands before you, and on behalf of his country- 
men invites you to come over into Africa and help us." 

On his return to Africa Mr. Crowther resumed his 
work at Abeokuta, and within the next two or three 
years made good progress in his translation of the 
New Testament. In 1853, the British government 
planned for another exploring expedition up the river 
Niger, similar to that on which Crowther had gone 
in 1 84 1. He was asked to go with this second expedi- 
tion also, and gladly accepted the invitation, for he 
felt that the time might now be ripe for the estab- 
lishment of mission stations in this region. This ex- 
pedition was much more successful, in every way, 
than the first one had been, and Dr. Baikie, the head 
of the party, told Mr. Crowther at its close: 

" I cannot allow you to depart without expressing to 
you in the warmest manner the pleasure I derived from 



142 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

your company, and acknowledging the information I 
have reaped from you. . . . It is nothing more than 
a simple fact that no slight portion of the success we 
met with in our intercourse with the tribes is due to 
you." 

In June, 1857, Dr. Baikie and Mr. Crowther started 
up the Niger again, accompanied by a group of young 
traders and a company of native missionary workers. 
Wherever Dr. Baikie established a trading-post, leav- 
ing a trader in charge of it, Mr. Crowther established 
a mission station, leaving one or more of the native 
missionaries at each place. They were cordially re- 
ceived everywhere, and after two years and a half of 
work, several very successful mission stations had been 
established, all of them in the entire charge of native 
missionaries. The Church Missionary Society was 
greatly pleased at the success of this work on the Niger, 
but they felt that if it was to be permanent, some ex- 
perienced worker must be appointed as bishop, to over- 
see the work of the young African missionaries in the 
newly opened stations. Only a week after his return 
from the Niger Mr. Crowther received a letter from 
the Missionary Society, summoning him to England 
immediately to attend a meeting of the General Com- 
mittee. He was a little puzzled to know why his pres- 
ence in England was so urgently demanded, but 
started at once, arriving just in time for the Committee 
Meeting. He was then told that he had been sum- 
moned to England because the Church wished to bestow 
upon him one of the highest honors which it could 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 143 

confer, namely, the office of bishop. They told him 
that he was to be Bishop of the Niger, with full charge 
of all the work on the Niger river. 

At first all that the astonished man could say was . 

" I am not worthy! " but later he insisted that one 
of the English missionaries should be made bishop. 

" Why should they be left and I be asked to take up 
such an office ? " he protested. " No, I am their 
servant in the field ; I cannot accept it." 

" But we saw them all," Mr. Venn, the secretary of 
the Society, told him. " We knew and appreciated 
their work before asking you to take this office." 

But Mr. Crowther was immovable in his refusal to 
accept this honor, and finally Mr. Venn sent him 
away to spend two days in the country with an old 
friend who had been a missionary in Africa, and who 
used every argument he could think of to persuade 
his guest to yield to the wishes of the Society. But 
when Mr. Crowther returned to London he was 
still convinced that he was not the man to be bishop. 
Mr. Venn, however, would not be refused. Taking 
both the younger man's hands in his, and looking 
straight into his eyes, he said : 

" Samuel Adjai, my son, will you deny me my last 
wish asked of you before I die?" This appeal did 
what all the arguments had failed to do, and looking 
up with tears in his eyes, Mr. Crowther answered : 

"It is the Lord; let him do what seemeth to him 
good." 

The old cathedral at Canterbury has seldom been so 



144 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

crowded as on the day when the " Black Minister " 
was consecrated as bishop. Special trains were run 
from London, and long before the service took place 
thousands were thronging the building. Up in the very 
front was a quiet, elderly woman who told the church- 
warden that she had a right to a good seat " because 
the Black Minister to be consecrated bishop this morn- 
ing was taught the alphabet by me." She was Mrs. 
Weeks, one of the missionaries at Sierra Leone, who 
had welcomed the little slave boy whom Captain Leeke 
had brought to them. And Captain Leeke himself 
was there, in his naval uniform, eager to see the con- 
ferring of this great honor on the boy whom he had 
taken from the hold of the slave-ship so many years 
before. The entire country was interested in what 
took place in Canterbury Cathedral that day, and even 
the newspapers entreated the prayers of their readers 
for Mr. Crowther and his diocese. 

The bishop seems never to have lost that spirit of 
humility which had made him so reluctant to accept 
this high office. His son, who for several years acted 
as his private secretary, says in a letter: 

" When he was written to as ' My Lord,' my father 
used to tell me, in reply, to put a postscript thus: 
' Please address me as Right Reverend Bishop and 
never as My Lord.' " 

The new bishop sailed for Africa immediately after 
his consecration, where he was greeted with the hearti- 
est and most enthusiastic congratulations of a host of 
friends. He started on a trip up the Niger almost at 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER 145 

once, revisiting the mission stations already estab- 
lished and founding new ones. This was the beginning 
of twenty-seven years of steady, untiring discharge 
of the responsibilities of the bishop of West Africa. 
For more than a quarter of a century after his con- 
secration Bishop Crowther went to and fro among 
his people, strengthening and developing work already 
begun, building up the churches, starting schools, pre- 
paring dictionaries and grammars of the different dia- 
lects, making translations of the Bible, training and 
ordaining new Christian workers, and lending a hand 
wherever there was need. He was quite as skilful at 
teaching his people how to make sun-dried bricks for 
a church building as at preparing translations of the 
Scriptures for them. 

The bishop's heart was often wrung at the persecu- 
tions to which the Christians were subjected, but at 
the same time he thrilled with pride in their devotion 
and loyalty. The Christian slaves of pagan masters 
suffered most cruelly, for they had no means of pro- 
tection. Beatings, imprisonment, starvation, torture, 
even death itself, did not stamp out the little Christian 
communities. One poor black slave, in the midst of 
persecution, received word from his master that he 
would not only receive pardon but also gifts and pro- 
motion, if he would give up his Christianity, but that 
if he remained a Christian he would be terribly tor- 
tured. He sent back word: 

" Tell the master I thank him for his kindness. 
He himself knows that I never refused to perform 



146 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

duties required of me at home. But as regards turn- 
ing back to heathen worship, that is out of my power, 
for Jesus has taken charge of my heart and padlocked 
it. The key is with him." 

Perhaps the greatest hindrances to Christian work, 
however, did not come from the Africans, but from 
white men who came to the country to make money, 
and cared nothing at all for the black men with whom 
they did business. Because they could make money 
by selling liquor to these ignorant, childlike people, 
they sold it without regard to the terrible physical 
and moral injury caused. One tribal king, the Emir 
of Nupe, who was not a Christian, but knew Bishop 
Crowther, wrote an appealing letter to one of the na- 
tive pastors, imploring the bishop's help in protecting 
his people from liquor: 

" Salute Crowther, the great Christian minister. 
After salutation please tell him he is a father to us in 
this land. Anything he sees will injure us in all this 
land he would not like. . . . The matter about which 
I am speaking with my mouth, write it; it is as if it is 
done by my hand; it is not a long matter, it is about 
barasa (rum), barasa, barasa, barasa, — it has ruined 
my country, it has ruined my own people very much, 
it has made our people become mad ! I have given a 
law that no one dares buy or sell it, and any one who 
is found selling it, his house is to be eaten up (plun- 
dered) ; any one found drunk will be killed. I have 
told all the Christian traders that I agree to every- 
thing for trade except barasa. I have told Mr. Mc- 



A BISHOP OF THE NIGER ' 147 

Intosh's people to-day the barasa remaining with them 
to-day must be returned down the river. Tell Crow- 
ther, the great Christian minister, that he is our fa- 
ther. I beg you don't forget the writing because we 
will all beg that he should beg the great priests (the 
Missionary Society), that they should beg the Eng- 
lish Queen to prevent bringing barasa to this land. 
For God and the prophet's sake he must help us in this 
matter — that of barasa. We all have confidence in 
him ; we must not have our country to become spoiled 
by barasa. Tell him may God bless him and his work ! 
This is the mouth word from Maliki, the Emir of 
Nupe." 

He was ever anxious to press on into unoccupied 
fields to establish mission stations among new groups of 
people, and often this work took him into unknown and 
unexplored regions. During one of his visits to Eng- 
land the Royal Geographical Society paid him the high 
honor of asking him to read them a paper about the 
river Niger. An enthusiastic vote of thanks was given 
him by the Society, and its members presented him 
with a beautiful gold watch in recognition of the 
valuable additions he had made to geographical knowl- 
edge. 

Whether in discouragement or prosperity, in disap- 
pointment or success, the bishop never wearied. When 
old age and illness brought weakness, he never ceased 
to work for his people. When he was called to lay 
down his work on earth he was busily engaged in 
translating the Prayer Book into the Hausa language, 



148" COMRADES IN SERVICE 

and was just about to set out on a trip to one of his 
mission stations. 

On August 4, 1898, a white marble monument was 
unveiled in the presence of a great audience in the 
cemetery of Lagos. White people and black people 
were gathered together to see the unveiling, for the 
white people and the black people had given the money 
for the beautiful stone. On it are engraved the words : 

SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF 

THE RIGHT REV. SAMUEL ADJAI CROWTHER, D.D., 

A NATIVE OF OSHOGUN, IN THE YORUBA COUNTRY; 

A RECAPTURED AND LIBERATED SLAVE ; 

THE FIRST STUDENT IN THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY'S COLLEGE, 

AT FOURAH BAY, SIERRA LEONE; 

ORDAINED IN ENGLAND BY THE BISHOP OF LONDON, JUNE IlTH, 1843 J 

THE FIRST NATIVE CLERGYMAN OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 

IN WEST AFRICA, 

CONSECRATED BISHOP JUNE 29TH, 1 864. 

A FAITHFUL, EARNEST AND DEVOTED MISSIONARY IN CONNECTION WITH 

THE CHURCH MISSIONARY SOCIETY FOR 62 YEARS, 

AT SIERRA LEONE, IN THE TIMINI AND YORUBA COUNTRIES, 

AND IN THE NIGER TERRITORY; 

HE ACCOMPANIED THE FIRST ROYAL NIGER EXPEDITION IN 184I J 

WAS A JOINT FOUNDER WITH OTHERS OF THE YORUBA MISSION IN 1 845, 

AND FOUNDER OF THE NIGER MISSION IN 1857; 

AND OF THE SELF-SUPPORTING NIGER DELTA PASTORATE IN 189I ; 

HE FELL ASLEEP IN JESUS AT LAGOS, ON THE 31ST DECEMBER, 189I, 

AGED ABOUT 89 YEARS. 

"WELL DONE, THOU GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT . . . ENTER 
THOU INTO THE JOY OF THY LORD." — MATT. XXV. 21. 

" REDEEMED BY HIS BLOOD." 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 



I felt that I had the honor of the whole African race on my 
shoulders. 

— Frances Jackson Coppin. 








FRANCES JACKSON COPPIN 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 

Frances Jackson Coppin first opened her eyes in the 
District of Columbia. One of her earliest memories is 
of the tiny one-room cabin where her black grand- 
mother lived, to which she was often sent to keep 
" Mammy " company. Mammy was a slave, and so 
was Frances' mother, and so too was the little black 
girl- herself. But mammy's husband, Fanny's grand- 
father, managed to save enough money to buy his 
liberty, and as soon as he was free he went to work 
to earn money to purchase his children. He finally 
succeeded in freeing four of them, including his 
daughter, Sarah. Sarah had always been devoted to 
her bright little niece, Fanny, and her first decision 
after she was free was that she would secure little 
Fanny's liberty. She soon found work at six dol- 
lars a month, and each month she put away every cent 
she could possibly spare, until finally she had saved the 
$125 which were needed to purchase Fanny. 

By the time Fanny was free she was quite a big 
girl, old enough to go to school and passionately eager 
for a chance for an education. So her aunt Sarah 
sent her to another aunt, who lived in New Bedford, 
Massachusetts, hoping that there Fanny could find a 
place to work for her board and go to school at the 

149 



150 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

same time. Her aunt succeeded in securing a place 
for the child with a family who promised that she 
might go to school whenever she was not at work, 
but Fanny soon found that she could never be spared 
on wash days, nor ironing days, nor cleaning days, and 
needless to say her education did not progress very 
rapidly while she was in this home. 

When she was fourteen, an aunt by marriage invited 
her to Newport with her, promising her a home and a 
better chance to go to school. But eager as Fanny was 
for an education, she was not willing to be dependent 
upon her aunt, who had much kindness of heart but 
little money, and although she went with her to New- 
port she was determined to support herself. She 
soon secured a position in the home of a family named 
Calvert, who let her have one hour to herself every 
other afternoon. This arrangement did not, of course, 
offer any possibility of attendance at school, but Fanny 
found some one who would give her private lessons, 
and she made the very most of her three free hours a 
week. She was almost as eager for a chance to study 
music as to go to school, and out of her weekly wages 
she paid for a music lesson each week, practising when- 
ever she could find any time, on a piano which she 
rented and kept in her aunt's home. 

Her life in the Calvert home was a very pleasant 
one, for Mrs. Calvert had no children and treated 
Fanny more as a daughter than as a servant, teaching 
her many of the things which a mother teaches her 
daughter and giving her an unusual share in the life 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 151 

of the home. But comfortable and well cared for as 
she was, Fanny was content to stay only long enough 
to earn the money which she needed to take her to 
school. 

" My life there was most happy," she says, " and I 
never would have left her, but it was in me to get an 
education and to teach my people. This idea was 
deep in my soul. Where it came from I cannot tell, 
for I had never had any exhortations nor any lectures 
which influenced me to take this course." " Fanny, 
will money keep you?" Mrs. Calvert asked her, sym- 
pathizing with the girl's ambition, but dreading to part 
with her. " But," says Mrs. Coppin, " that deep-seated 
purpose to get an education and become a teacher to my 
people yielded to no inducement of comfort or tem- 
porary gain." 

For a few months Fanny went to the public school 
for colored children in Newport, and then entered the 
Rhode Island State Normal School, at Bristol. 

" But, having finished the course there," she says, 
" I felt that I had just begun to learn." 

In some way she heard of Oberlin College, 1 the 
only college in the United States which was then open 
to colored students, and she determined that she 
would go there and take the college course. Her aunt 
Sarah, who was increasingly proud of the clever, am- 
bitious niece whose freedom she had purchased, gave 
her money for the journey; Bishop Payne, of the 
African Methodist Episcopal Church, gave her a 
*At Oberlin, Ohio. 



152 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

scholarship of nine dollars a year; and she was soon 
hard at work at Oberlin. 

The Oberlin faculty did not advise their women 
students to take the course planned for the men, which 
included a great deal of Latin and Greek and higher 
mathematics. But women were not forbidden to enter 
this course, and Fanny Jackson, whose ambition and 
courage knew no bounds, at once enrolled herself in it. 

" I took a long breath," she says, " and prepared for 
a delightful contest." 

" I never rose to recite in my classes at Oberlin," 
she once said, " but that I felt that I had the honor 
of the whole African race upon my shoulders. I felt 
that, should I fail, it would be ascribed to the fact 
that I was colored." 

Many years after she had left Oberlin she recalled 
her excitement when her Greek professor announced 
that he was planning to visit the mathematics class 
to which she belonged. " I was particularly anxious 
to show him that I was as safe in mathematics as in 
Greek," she said. " I indeed was more anxious, for I 
had always heard that my race was good in the lan- 
guages, but stumbled when they came to mathematics." 
Probably few triumphs ever gave her more pleasure 
than the brilliant recitation in mathematics which she 
made in the presence of her Greek professor that 
day. 

Oberlin offered no French in its curriculum, but 
Fanny had had a beginning in that language when she 
was at the Rhode Island State Normal School, and 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 153 

when she found that a professor at Oberlin was will- 
ing to give her private French lessons, she could not 
resist the temptation to add them to her regular college 
work. When commencement time came her gradua- 
tion essay was distinguished among its fellows in that 
it was written in French! 

In addition to her studies, Fanny Jackson did prac- 
tise teaching in the preparatory school, and helped to 
support herself at Oberlin by giving music lessons to 
sixteen private pupils. She was also a member of the 
famous student choir of Oberlin. During the latter 
part of her college life a great many of the Negroes 
whom the war had freed poured into Ohio from the 
South and a number of them settled in Oberlin. Their 
helplessness and lack of education made an instant 
appeal to Fanny Jackson, and in her senior year she 
added an evening class for them to her already heavy 
schedule. 

" It was deeply touching to me to see the old men 
painfully following the simple words of spelling, so 
intensely eager to learn," she said, and she could not 
turn away from an opportunity to help them. 

Her college days were more than busy, but they 
were thoroughly happy, for she had at last won the 
opportunity to prepare herself to work for her race, 
and she was in the midst of the most congenial and 
kindly people. During the greater part of her college 
life she lived in the home of Professor and Mrs. Peck, 
and she never failed to acknowledge her debt to the 
influence of that Christian home. Nor did she ever 



154 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

forget the sympathy and friendship of her fellow stu- 
dents. " One day at Mrs. Peck's," she wrote long 
afterward, " when we girls were sitting on the floor 
getting our Greek, Miss Sutherland from Maine sud- 
denly stopped, and looking at me said : ' Fanny Jack- 
son, were you ever a slave? ' I said ' Yes,' and she 
burst into tears. Not another word was spoken by us, 
but those tears seemed to wipe out a little of what 
was wrong." 

The year before Fanny Jackson's graduation the 
faculty of the Institute for Colored Youth, of Phila- 
delphia, applied to Oberlin for a colored woman teacher 
of Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics. The Ober- 
lin faculty at once responded : " We have the woman, 
but you must wait a year for her." The school waited, 
and a year later the class poet of the class of '65 began 
her work in the school with which she was intimately 
associated for thirty-seven years. 

The Institute for Colored Youth had always at- 
tracted a great deal of attention, and was constantly 
visited by people from all over the United States and 
Europe. Miss Jackson's classes were of special inter- 
est to visitors, and she never needed to be ashamed 
of the work her students were doing. One visitor, who 
listened to her class in Horace dealing with some 
particularly difficult meters, was so delighted with their 
work that he presented their teacher with the copy 
of Horace which he had used in college. At another 
time Miss Jackson invited an English nobleman, who 
had been listening to a public examination of one of 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 155 

her classes, to take the class and examine them fur- 
ther. But the Englishman promptly declined the in- 
vitation with the remark : " They are more capable of 
examining me ; their proficiency is simply wonderful." 

Four years after Miss Jackson went to Philadelphia 
the principal of the Institute for Colored Youth was 
called to Haiti, as United States Minister, and the 
school was left in charge of Professor Octavius Catto 
and Miss Jackson, Mr. Catto taking special respon- 
sibility for the boys' department, Miss Jackson being 
in charge of the girls' work. 

Soon after the management of the school was en- 
trusted to Mr. Catto and Miss Jackson, they abolished 
the work in Greek and Latin. There was an increasing 
demand for their students as teachers in public schools, 
where Latin and Greek were not taught, but a thorough 
training in the three Rs, geography, history, literature, 
and science, was required. After the work in the 
classics was dropped, added emphasis was laid on 
these other subjects and Miss Jackson established a 
course in normal training in which the young people 
who were to be teachers were trained in the theory 
of teaching, school management, and similar subjects. 
The successful work done by the scores and hundreds 
of colored teachers who received their training in the 
normal department of the Institute is a strong testi- 
mony to the character and thoroughness of the work 
Miss Jackson gave them. 

Fanny Jackson was not satisfied, however, with the 
addition of a normal department to the Institute. She 



i 5 6 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

felt that the school had succeeded splendidly in its 
original purpose of proving that the Negro was as 
capable of advanced education as any one, and that its 
task after the close of the war must be a very different 
one. She was more than glad to drop Greek and Latin 
from the course, for she felt that a knowledge of the 
dead languages would be of little or no use to the great 
majority of her race, and she was hearjtily glad to add 
a normal department for the training of those who 
purposed to teach. But she could not rest until the 
Institute had made provision for the great masses of 
young Negroes who must support themselves in other 
ways than by teaching, and she set her heart and mind 
upon the establishment of an industrial department. 

Not long after the Philadelphia Centennial Exposi- 
tion of 1876, a group of prominent educators of Phila- 
delphia met to discuss the question of what ought to 
be done in the way of industrial training, and Miss 
Jackson was asked to tell what was being done for 
the industrial education of the young colored people of 
Philadelphia. 

" It may well be understood that I had a tale to 
tell ! " she says, " and I told them the only places in 
the city where a colored boy could learn a trade, was 
in the House of Refuge or the Penitentiary, and the 
sooner he became incorrigible and got into the Refuge, 
or committed a crime and got into the Penitentiary, 
the more promising it would be for his industrial 
training. It was to me a serious occasion. I so ex- 
pressed myself. As I saw building after building go- 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 157 

ing up in this city and not a single colored hand em- 
ployed in the construction it made the occasion a very 
serious one to me." 

The day after this meeting the wife of one of the 
school directors drove up to the Institute and said to 
Miss Jackson : " I was there last night and heard what 
you said about the limitations of the colored youth, and 
I am here to say that, if the colored people will go 
ahead and start a school for the purpose of having 
the colored youth given this greatly needed education, 
you will find plenty of friends to help you. Here are 
fifty dollars to get you started, and you will find as 
much behind it as you need." " We only needed a 
feather's weight of encouragement to take up the 
burden," Mrs. Coppin said, in telling of this incident. 
" We started out at once." 

A temporary organization was formed to establish 
the industrial department, and Miss Jackson was made 
its field agent. Her task was not an easy one. It 
takes much money to equip an industrial school, and 
the colored people to whom she turned for help had lit- 
tle to give. But she was determined that the founda- 
tions of the industrial work should be laid by the 
people for whose benefit it was established. If they, 
out of their poverty, gave for this cause, she knew that 
she would have a most convincing plea to make to those 
who could offer larger contributions. Before she could 
win the gifts of her race, however, she must win their 
interest and belief in industrial work, for to some of 
them manual labor was still associated with slavery; 



158 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

and it was not always easy to make them see that it was 
as dignified and valuable as professional work. But 
Fanny Jackson's arguments and eloquence were irre- 
sistible and her people rallied around her in Phila- 
delphia and its suburbs, in New York, in Washington, 
and wherever she went. She would never ask for a 
gift larger than a dollar, and the industrial department 
was started with a sum which amounted to a little less 
than three thousand dollars. " Three thousand dol- 
lars was a mere drop in the bucket," Mrs. Coppin said 
afterward, " but it was a great deal to us, who had seen 
it collected in small sums — quarters, dollars, and like 
amounts." It was characteristic of Fanny Jackson's 
thoroughness that she prepared for what she called her 
" industrial crusade " by a two years' study of political 
economy under Dr. William Elder, of Philadelphia. 

Soon the industrial department was well established 
in a building the brickwork of which had been made 
by the students. Classes in plastering, carpentry, 
shoemaking, printing, and tailoring were provided for 
the boys ; dressmaking and millinery for the girls ; and 
cooking, stenography, and typewriting for both boys 
and girls. Thus several years before Tuskegee was 
established the Institute for Colored Youth had under- 
taken the task of furnishing a thorough industrial 
training to its students. 

One of the greatest difficulties in the beginning of 
this work was that of finding employment for the 
graduates after they had learned their trades. In order 
to bring the industrial work of the school before the 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 159 

public, Mrs. Coppin established an Industrial Ex- 
change, and held several exhibits of work by the 
pupils. Both colored and white people attended these 
exhibits, and signified their interest and approval most 
encouragingly. Visits to the school itself did even 
more than exhibits to convince people of the value of 
the work done there. " Many were the ejaculations of 
satisfaction at this busy hive of industry," said Mrs. 
Coppin. " Ah," said some, " this is the way the school 
should have begun; the good Quaker people began at 
the wrong end." But Fanny Jackson did not agree 
with this statement. " When they began this school," 
she said, " the whole South was a great industrial 
plant where the fathers taught the sons and the 
mothers taught the daughters, but the mind was 
left in darkness. That is the reason that John 
C. Calhoun is said to have remarked : ' If you 
will show me a Negro who can conjugate a Greek 
verb, I will give up all my preconceived ideas of 
him; ' so that the managers had builded wiser than 
many people knew." 

In 1881 Miss Jackson was married to the Rev. Levi 
J. Coppin. Her marriage did not, however, affect 
her relation to the Institute. She continued to be its 
principal for over twenty years more, and found time 
also to care for her home, and to take an active part 
in the work of her church. 

Mrs. Coppin seems always to have made a strong 
impression as a public speaker. At one time Dr. James 
McAllister, then superintendent of the public schools 



160 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

of Philadelphia, declined an invitation to speak to the 
parents and pupils of the Octavius Catto School, on 
the plea of many other engagements. When, how- 
ever, he was told that Mrs. Coppin was to speak on the 
same occasion he decided to accept the invitation after 
all, for, he said, " I must surely hear Mrs. Coppin, 
for I consider her the very best speaker on methods of 
instruction I have ever heard, either abroad or in 
America." 

In 1902 Mrs. Coppin resigned the principalship of 
the Institute for Colored Youth in order to go to South 
Africa, where her husband had been appointed Bishop 
of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Here, 
although no longer young, she began the most arduous 
work she had ever attempted, under very difficult con- 
ditions. Traveling in South Africa was slow and very 
tiring and trying, but Mrs. Coppin unhesitatingly ac- 
companied her husband far into the interior, at one 
time going as far as Bulawayo, 1,360 miles from their 
base of operations at Cape Town. The headquarters 
at Cape Town to which they returned after their long 
trips were not the most comfortable or restful, but 
Mrs. Coppin says, " the one absorbing thought was, 
how shall we accomplish the work for which we left 
our homes ? " 

The condition of the colored people in Cape Town 
at once aroused Mrs. Coppin's sympathy. The ma- 
jority of the Negroes who had been born in or near 
Cape Town were of mixed blood, exceedingly poor, 
uneducated, and untrained. At the same time saloons 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 161 

were plentiful in Cape Town, sometimes three in a 
block. " It surely cannot be difficult to imagine how 
easily a people so neglected in the higher ideals of life 
would turn to the drink habit as a mere pastime," Mrs. 
Coppin wrote. 

The state of the pure-blooded Africans who came to 
Cape Town from the interior was no better. Most 
of them were employed in unloading ships or in work 
on the railroad, and were quartered in " locations " 
a mile or two beyond the city limits. Mrs. Coppin 
wrote of them, " The cabins or huts provided for them 
by the government at Cape Town are very inferior 
for comfort to those built by the natives in their rural 
habitat before being brought into contact with our so- 
called civilization. The Cape Town location for 
Negroes was on a tract of land that would be fairly 
flooded with water during the rainy season, and many 
who came down hale and hearty would return as con- 
sumptives — a disease practically unknown to the 
' heathen ' — or never return at all. The drink habit 
would soon be learned by these raw natives and their 
last state would be worse than the first." 

Mrs. Coppin directed most of her energies in Cape 
Town toward organizing the women into Woman's 
Christian Temperance Union Societies. She not only 
succeeded in establishing a strong society in Cape 
Town itself, but started others at several near-by 
towns where there were mission stations. 

" At our first annual session of the Conference which 
met at Port Elizabeth," Mrs. Coppin wrote, " the sight 



162 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

of native and colored women at a missionary meeting 
was one of the features of the Conference; and a glori- 
ous and inspiring sight it was. Gathered about me on the 
platform and around the altar were women who had 
never before appeared in public for Christian work; at 
least, never before to take a leading part in it. They 
had been lately organized, and now they were called 
upon to do the work of officers, and to speak to the 
public gathering for themselves ; some in Dutch — their 
mother tongue — some in broken English, and some in 
their own God-given native tongue." 

The greater part of Mrs. Coppin's time and energy 
was, however, spent in the interior, going with her 
husband to the remote stations to teach the women of 
the Father-God, for love of whom she had come so 
far. The simple native folk made a strong appeal to 
her, and she looked back upon the years in Africa as 
very happy ones, in spite of their constant discomforts 
and hardships. 

After their return from Africa the Coppins again 
made their home in Philadelphia. Mrs. Coppin's 
health did not permit her to take up her teaching 
again, but in response to the request of many friends 
she gave herself with great interest to the prepara- 
tion of a book on Reminiscences of School Life and 
Teaching, the words of the dedication being, " To my 
beloved aunt, Sarah Orr Clark, who, working at six 
dollars a month, saved one hundred and twenty-five 
dollars, and bought my freedom." The final editing 
and publishing of the book was, however, done by her 



A BELIEVER IN BLACK FOLK 163 

husband, for she had not finished her work when death 
came in January, 1913. 

The latter part of Mrs. Coppin's book consists of 
biographical sketches of several young colored men 
and women who had been her pupils at the Institute, 
and whose useful lives are her best memorial. Her 
joy and pride in them were equaled only by their love 
and reverence for her. One of them who knew her 
best says: 

" The chief characteristics of Mrs. Coppin were 
modesty and a most beautiful unselfishness; and be- 
cause of these rare qualities she was ever ready to plead 
for the weak and oppressed. She always sought the 
advance of causes, and never that of self. It was 
these qualities combined with fine ability that made 
her the good, noble woman we all loved and honored, 
and whose memory and life-work we would per- 
petuate." 



AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS 



O God, save my country and save my soul. 

— Syngman Rhee. 



<y^:M^y^4/--rm : 




SYNGMAN RHEE 



AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS 

When Christian missionaries first entered Korea, 
the " Land of the Morning Calm," about thirty years 
ago, they found a people gentle, hospitable, friendly, 
and responsive, but a people desperately poor and 
improvident, a people from whom all ambition and 
hope seemed to have been crushed. Centuries of op- 
pression by a corrupt and selfish government had left 
them patiently resigned to ill treatment and poverty, 
with no thought that conditions could ever be improved. 
The emperor was not naturally cruel, but he was weak 
and selfish, and thought very little of how he might 
serve his people, and a great deal of how they might 
enrich him. He seized the property of his rich sub- 
jects who were within reach of the capital; his pro- 
vincial governors stole from the prominent men in 
their sections of the country; and petty officials preyed 
upon every one else. Officials were appointed, not 
because of honesty or ability, but because they could 
afford to pay for an office. The larger the amount 
paid, the higher the office secured. The old govern- 
ment of Korea, says one who was an official under 
it, was the worst in Asia, and as bad as that of Turkey. 
Of the emperor one of his subjects declared, " He 
handcuffed us, he robbed us, he paddled us, he hanged 

165 



166 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

and quartered us, he lived for himself alone and for 
his worn-out superstitions." 

Into this country, under this government, Syngman 
Rhee was born. His parents were people of high 
class whose highest ambition for their only son was 
that he should become so proficient in the Confucian 
classics as to be able some day to compete in the gov- 
ernment examinations and win the coveted literary 
degree, which was the passport, outwardly at least, 
to high government office. " My earliest recollections," 
Mr. Rhee says, " are associated with daily study of 
great books spread out before me, whole pages of 
which I was expected to commit to memory." The 
boy shared his parents' ambition and was very proud 
of his Confucian scholarship, very suspicious and con- 
temptuous of the schools established by the foreign 
men of a strange religion from across the sea. Some 
of his friends left the old Confucian school to study 
" new things " in the schools of the foreigners, and 
often urged Rhee to join them and learn of the won- 
derful things which the people of the Western world 
had invented. They told him thrilling tales of rail- 
roads, telegraph lines, even of flying-machines, but 
Rhee turned a deaf ear, and deemed his friends traitors 
in going to a school which gave foreign education and 
taught of a religion other than that of their native 
country. " Let them change the order of heaven and 
earth," he declared, " I shall never give up my mother 
religion; " and he prayed the more earnestly to his idols 



AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS 167 

to destroy the religion of the " foreign devils " before 
it could work harm to his country. 

In 1894, however, the China-Japanese war brought 
many changes in the " Land of the Morning Calm." 
Korea, with the rest of the Orient, began to ask why 
it was that the tiny Sunrise Kingdom had been able 
to defeat the great celestial empire so completely, 
and began to understand that the secret of Japan's 
power lay in the fact that she had been learning from 
the Western world, and had replaced medievalism with 
a thoroughly modern civilization. For the time being 
it was more important for young men who aspired to 
government positions to be familiar with the English 
language than the Confucian classics, and Syngman 
Rhee felt that he must learn English if his ambitions 
for government office were to be fulfilled. But if he 
were to study English he must go to the mission 
school, for it was not taught in the old Confucian 
schools. For days the boy struggled between his de- 
sire for English and his dislike and fear of the for- 
eigners and the school they had established. He hated 
the " heaven-wicked doctrine " which was taught in the 
school, and feared that the missionaries would " be- 
witch " him into believing it by mysterious foreign 
medicines. He remembered how his mother had sent 
him every year, on his birthday, to the great Dwo 
Mookai Buddhist temple to offer sacrifices and prayers, 
and he did not dare tell her that he was even thinking 
of such an impious act as attendance at a Christian 



168 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

school. Ambition finally conquered, however, and he 
entered the Pai Chai mission school. 

Probably no more self-sufficient, independent, proud- 
spirited boy ever enrolled in the school. He was sus- 
picious of the motives of those who had left their own 
distant country to come to teach in his; he hated the 
chapel services' which all students were required to 
attend, listened as little as possible to what was said 
there, and scoffed at whatever he could not help hear- 
ing. When he left the school, he was apparently as 
unfriendly to Christianity as when he entered it. But 
while he had been learning the language of trie country 
from which his teachers came he had caught much of 
the spirit. He had read of countries where the 
people were not oppressed as in Korea, of governments 
which were unselfish and patriotic, and his heart was 
fired with desire to bring to his nation the reforms so 
greatly needed. ie Those who know anything about 
the political oppression to which the common mass of 
Korean people were mercilessly subjected would imag- 
ine what a revolution would have been wrought in the 
heart of a young Korean who heard for the first time 
in his life that the people in Christian lands were pro- 
tected by a law against the tyranny of their rulers/' he 
writes. " I said to myself, ' It would be a great blessing 
to my downtrodden fellow men if we could only 
adopt such a political principle.' " 

Other young men, educated in Christian schools or 
Christian countries, were also filled with the purpose to 
make a mighty effort to right the wrongs of centuries, 



AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS 169 

and a strong Independence Club was organized and 
was for a time very influential. A broad and far- 
reaching policy of reform was attempted and a number 
of reforms were introduced. Syngman Rhee was one 
of the leading spirits in this movement, and was fre- 
quently pointed out by the conservatives as one of the 
most dangerous of the young progressives. He edited 
a small daily newspaper, the first newspaper ever pub- 
lished wholly by Koreans, in which he fearlessly 
preached the doctrines of liberty and equality. His 
missionary teachers warned him that such plain and 
frequent speaking on these subjects might cost him 
his life, but the little daily kept on appearing until its 
editor was suddenly thrown into prison. The influ- 
ence of the reactionaries had finally triumphed with 
the emperor, and a sudden attack was made on the 
reform party. Armed police seized forty of the 
strongest of them, and the others escaped only by flight. 
Words are inadequate to describe the prison into 
which Rhee was thrown. He and his fellow captives, 
educated, cultured men like himself, were herded to- 
gether in one room like cattle, in company with the 
lowest criminals. Many were bound in torturing 
stocks, and the room was so crowded that even those 
not in stocks were often unable to lie down unless they 
lay on top of each other. The air was, of course, 
stifling; the sanitary conditions unspeakable, and dirt 
and vermin abounded everywhere. The food was 
filthy and often decaying, but the prisoners were in 
such a starved condition that the criminals, who were 



i;o COMRADES IN SERVICE 

physically stronger than the political prisoners and 
very unfriendly to them, often tore their portions 
away from them. The jailers, too, singled out the 
young reform leaders for especially cruel treatment. 

These conditions were terrible in themselves, but 
the most excruciating torture was added to them, in 
order to wring confessions of crime from the prison- 
ers, or to persuade them to give evidence against 
others. Syngman Rhee was one of those who suf- 
fered terrible torture. For seven long months his feet 
were in stocks, his hands bound in chains behind his 
back, and night and day he wore a wooden collar three 
feet long, two feet wide, and several inches thick 
around his neck. Small wonder that in that crowded, 
filthy room, unprotected from the heat of summer or 
the cold of winter, unable to lie down or shift his 
position in any way, Syngman Rhee envied those of 
his companions who were put to death, and waited 
impatiently for his own time to come. 

One day the door of his cell was thrown open, and 
the prisoners were told that the officers were coming 
to lead one of them to execution. When they begged 
to know which one was to be taken, the guards pointed 
to Rhee. " I could not but rejoice," he says, " for I 
felt that even a bloody execution would be a happy 
relief to my awful sufferings. Surely my life was a 
living death. I just had time to commit to my fellow 
prisoner a message, which he faithfully promised, if 
possible, to carry to my dear grief-stricken parents, 
when the sheriff approached. Instead of seizing me 



AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS 171 

he laid his hands on the poor fellow next me, and 
dragged him forth to die like a dog, while I was left 
to writhe in agony." 

Death had passed him by, but it had come so vividly 
near that it left Rhee very thoughtful. He felt certain 
that his execution was only a question of time, and he 
could not get away from the question, " What then? " 

Death he did not fear, but what followed? The 
three religions of Korea gave him no satisfactory an- 
swer. Confucianism said nothing whatever of a life 
after death; Buddhism had no clear, sure teaching of 
it, and he had had too much education to believe in 
the degrading superstitions of Shamanism. In his 
need his mind went back to what he had heard in the 
chapel of the mission school— of a God who was so 
tender a Father that he had sent his Son to the world 
that men might know that he loved them and longed 
to have them turn to him that he might give them 
eternal life. As Rhee thought of these things he became 
almost overwhelmed with a sense of his sinfulness in 
having hardened his heart to the truth he had heard 
from the missionaries, and in having bitterly and pub- 
licly spoken against Christ. In his agony of remorse 
he dimly remembered having heard that God would 
forgive the sins of those who repented, and in the hour 
of his deepest need he turned humbly and penitently to 
his Father. He had never prayed, and he scarcely 
knew how, but bending his head as well as he could 
in the wooden collar which bound him, he cried, " O 
God, save my country, and save my soul." It was his 



172 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

first prayer, and it is no wonder that it brought him a 
sense of peace and pardon. Each moment, as he sat 
bound in his stocks, he knew that he might hear the 
footsteps of those who, at his country's order, would 
take him to death, but he cried first, " O God, save my 
country ! " and afterward, " Save my soul ! " 

" Ah, it was then, almost immediately," he cried, 
" such a sweet peace as I had never known came into 
my soul and filled my eyes with tears of joy." He 
began at once to tell his fellow prisoners and guards 
of the peace which was filling his heart, but he longed 
for a Bible that he might know and teach them more 
of the blessed truth to which he had given so little 
heed when he was in the mission school. At last one 
of the guards succeeded in smuggling a little Testa- 
ment into the prison. One guard stood at the cell's 
little window to give warning of the approach of the 
jailer, and another held the book, while Rhee, hands 
fast bound behind him, eagerly read of the words of 
hope and comfort. " Day after day," he says, " I read 
with the tears streaming down my cheeks, and ex- 
plained as best I could its wonderful truths to those 
about me." One by one the criminals who had been 
so unfriendly and the guards who watched over him 
found the same peace which had come to him, and 
finally even the jailer, like the one who guarded the 
apostle Paul at Philippi, believed, and was baptized 
with all his house. 

Syngman Rhee was not executed, but was sentenced 
to prison for life. After the jailer's conversion, how- 




b3 ~ 



g £ 



AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS 173 

ever, he was moved from the crowded cell into one 
which was larger and more comfortable and from 
which he could reach a larger number of prisoners. 
He organized a number of the prisoners into a school 
and with the jailer's help secured text-books for them. 
Arithmetic, geography, history, political economy, and 
English were studied, but the Bible and the Christian 
religion were the subjects which received the most 
earnest attention. Man after man became a Christian, 
and Rhee organized a little church in the prison. Of 
course the news of Rhee's conversion brought great 
joy to the missionaries, who had never lost their touch 
with him, and they did everything in their power to 
help him in the work he was carrying on among the 
prisoners. Dr. Appenzeller, principal of the Pai Chai 
School, and Dr. Bunker, who had succeeded in securing 
permission to hold evangelistic services in the imperial 
prison, were able to send him a number of books and 
papers for his school, and the little reading room which 
he had established. At their suggestion, too, Rhee 
undertook to translate several English books of various 
kinds into Korean. A part of one of these manu- 
scripts, written on rough brown paper and stained with 
prison soil, is still in the possession of one of the mis- 
sionaries. 

Among Rhee's converts was Kim Hong-biu, one of 
the group of political prisoners. Before the day on 
which he was executed he was so fearfully tortured 
that his bones were broken, but his fellow prisoners 
said that he was one of the happiest men they had 



174 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

ever seen. On the day set for his death his old father 
and mother and his wife and children came to the 
prison hoping to see him. They were not allowed to 
go in, but the guard said to Kim, " If you have some 
special message, I will take it to your father." Kim 
thought for a few minutes, then said : " Tell my people 
that this filthy house of suffering and torture has been 
a pok-dang (house of blessing) to me. I am glad I 
came here, for I have learned about Jesus Christ. Give 
them my Bible and tell them to believe in Jesus." 

Another man won to Christ by Syngman Rhee was 
Yi Sang-jai, a veteran Korean statesman. He was 
for several years secretary of the Korean legation at 
Washington, and on his return to Korea became a 
member of the Independence party. He was at one 
time its vice-president, and later was secretary of the 
imperial cabinet of Korea. During all this time he was 
a vigorous opponent of Christianity, although some of 
his fellow reformers were earnest Christians. One of 
them once said to him, " You will yet remember Christ 
in prison," and the words came to Yi like a prophecy 
when, two years later, he and several of his friends 
were thrown into prison. There was death for some, 
and torture for many, but none suffered more than 
Yi Sang-jai, who was forced to see his son tortured 
before his eyes in a vain effort to make him confess 
some crime which would justify his father's execution. 
But he still refused to listen to any word of Chris- 
tianity, and repulsed all Syngman Rhee's efforts to 
comfort him with the message of a God of love. 



AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS 175 

Gradually, however, almost imperceptibly at first, 
there came a change. At last Yi Sang-jai saw his op- 
position to Christianity as sin, and turned in penitence, 
as Rhee himself had done. From that time on he was 
as ardent a preacher of Christianity as he had been 
an opponent. Within two years after his release from 
prison Yi Sang-jai was made secretary of the em- 
peror's cabinet, a position of great prominence and 
influence. Yet he said one day to the Rev. James S. 
Gale, a missionary friend, " I find myself longing for 
those old days in that hole of a prison. We had such 
blessed times in our study and communion there, and 
now I am so busy with these crowds of people and 
government affairs that I find it impossible to pray as 
much or read my books as I would like." Dr. Gale 
says that of five hundred people who some time ago 
joined the church to which Yi Sang-jai belongs a large 
proportion testified that they had become Christians 
as a result of his influence. After the change in gov- 
ernment in Korea Yi Sang-jai became the Religious 
Work Director of the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion in Seoul. 

Another fellow prisoner of Syngman Rhee noted 
for his opposition to Christianity was Kim Chung-sik. 
He was the chief of the Seoul police at the time that 
the Independence party was most active, and was not in 
sympathy with the reformers. But when he was or- 
dered one day to take his men and shoot into a crowd 
of people who were listening to a reform speaker, he 
refused to sanction such an unjustified cruelty. By 



1 76 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

this refusal he incurred the deep displeasure of the 
government and was soon sharing the fate of the re- 
formers in the Seoul prison. He was finally induced 
to join the little group of men who were studying the 
Bible, and one of them gave him a copy of Pilgrim's 
Progress, which Rhee had succeeded in having brought 
into the prison. Kim's interest was at once awakened 
in this book, when he saw that Bunyan, like himself, 
was in prison because of his convictions. One day, 
after he had finished reading it and was studying a 
leaflet by Dwight L. Moody, it seemed to him that 
Christ came into his cell, and looking into his face said, 
" Kim, give me your heart." " That was the happiest 
moment of my life," said Kim, " for I did it." After 
his release from prison he at once joined the Church, 
and soon afterward became interested in Christian 
work. 

One day he and Yi Sang-jai went together to call on 
the old Minister of War, who was chiefly responsible 
for their imprisonment and suffering. 

" Your Excellency was the cause of our being un- 
justly thrown into prison," they said to him frankly. 
" Some of us died in the prison; we were sick because 
of the food and filth; our wives and children nearly 
starved to death." 

" I was tortured until one of the bones of my leg 
was broken," Kim told him, and Yi added, " You al- 
most killed my son in order to get him to confess 
something which would give you an excuse to kill me." 

" According to Korean codes we should try to kill 



AN AMBASSADOR IN CHAINS 177 

you now," they said, " but we have become Christians 
and are willing to forgive you. All that we ask of you 
is to confess your sins, believe in Jesus, and pray for 
forgiveness." The old man was touched by the plea 
of those whom he had so injured and promised that he 
would do as they urged him. 

When in 1904 the Russo-Japanese war ended, 
Japan's first act was to occupy Korea by establishing 
what was virtually a protectorate. Almost immedi- 
ately after Japan's occupation of the country (August 
7, 1904) Syngman Rhee was released from prison. 
He had endured almost unbelievable hardship and suf- 
fering, but he says, looking back to the joy which his 
allegiance to Christ and work for him had brought, " I 
can never forget how thankful I was in that prison, and 
I shall ever remain thankful for all the blessings which 
I received during the years of my imprisonment." 
Eager to get the best possible preparation for the 
service of God and his people he went to America for 
a further education. He graduated from George 
Washington University, took his Master's degree from 
Harvard, and his Ph.D. in the Theological Department 
of Princeton. Upon his return to Korea he became an 
active member of the Methodist Episcopal Church of 
Seoul, and accepted a position as Student Secretary of 
the Young Men's Christian Association. After several 
years of work in Korea he was asked to become the 
principal of the Korean school in Honolulu, and is now 
one of the leaders in Christian work in the Hawaiian 
Islands. 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 






A friend is one who knows all about us and loves us just the 
same. 

—Grace H. Dodge. 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 

Where cross the crowded ways of life, where 
strength is crushed by joyless toil, where lips lose their 
laughter and hearts forget their hope, there walked not 
long ago a friend. And goodness and mercy followed 
her all the days of her life, for wherever she walked 
joy songs came back to tired hearts, and weary ways 
were trodden with gallant cheer, for all the needy and 
hungry ones had found a friend who cared. One day 
in the warm golden glow of the world's great Friendly 
Time, when her home was filled with lonely ones 
from distant lands across the sea, the radiant Lord of 
Christmas touched her eyes and bade them open to 
look upon the unveiled beauty of his face. Then there 
were heard in factory and office, in school and home, in 
city and country, in the homeland and far-away lands, 
the voices of the strong and weak, the great and little, 
the rich and poor, saying, " We have lost a friend." 
And those who loved most understanding^ said, " We 
shall never again hear the word friend without think- 
ing of Miss Dodge." 

Grace Dodge began very early to walk the way of 
Friendly Hearts. A girl just out of school, she claimed 
as friends all other girls, and poured out her friend- 
ship in most abundant measure to those who needed 

179 



180 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

her most. Many of her friends were girls who worked 
for long hours in factories, and as her friendship with 
them grew she saw how many things there were which 
they did not know, and how few of them had any one 
to teach them. Always it was her way when she saw 
a need to do her utmost to meet it, so she gathered a 
group of these girls about her every week and very 
simply, very understandingly, talked with them about 
how to keep well and strong, how to use money wisely, 
how to dress, how to take care of sick folk, how to 
make friends, how to be the kind of person who is 
worthy of friends, and how to find strength and joy in 
fellowship with the Great Friend. Often she talked to 
them of the homes which they would some day make, 
and told them how to make the life-to-be a beautiful 
and radiant thing. She found that almost none of 
them could cook or sew, and she knew that they must 
somehow learn to do such things before they made these 
new homes. But there were no social settlements then 
where these subjects were taught, nor any industrial 
or night schools. So Miss Dodge found teachers and 
organized classes for the girls in cooking, sewing, and 
millinery. She did not wait for the girls to come to her 
but sought them out, and after they had once come 
they needed no further urging. They told the other 
girls whom they knew about their big-sister friend, 
and the first group grew until it had to be divided, and 
still the girls kept coming until there were not two 
but many " Clubs for Working Girls." When the 
membership in the clubs had grown into hun- 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 181 

dreds, Miss Dodge asked other people to come in 
and help, and the girls loved them too, but not quite 
as they did Miss Dodge. " They're jolly, and fine 
for a good time," one of the girls explained, " but if 
it's trouble there's only Miss Dodge." There was 
nothing they feared to bring to this friend of theirs, 
they were so certain of her understanding and sym- 
pathy. They were sure that no one else would ever 
know the secrets they told to her, that no confession 
that they might make would ever shake her faith in 
them or cost them her love. She was their friend, and 
" a friend is one who knows all about us and loves us 
just the same." 

Miss Dodge had no intention of losing her touch with 
her friends when they married and left the clubs for 
working girls. " The Domestic Circle " was formed for 
these married girls, and is now a strong independent 
organization, meeting its own expenses, planning its 
own programs, and inviting its own speakers. A warm 
personal letter went to its members every month from 
Miss Dodge. But it needed no organization to keep 
these women close to their helper; no girl who had 
ever known her friendship could drift away from her. 
"What did she really do for you?" some one once 
asked of a woman who had come into one of the clubs 
twenty years before. The woman's eyes rested on the 
little daughter who was standing at her knee, wandered 
over the attractive room of her home in which they 
were sitting, and then were rafsed to the visitor. " She 
made me," she answered quietly. " Everything that I 



182 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

am is due to her," these friends of Miss Dodge often 
say. " I have been a member of her clubs for twenty 
years," one of them said not long ago. " When I 
started with her I knew — well, I knew just nothing. 
I learned to sew, to cook, to embroider, to keep house, 
to shop, and to have a good time. I was a raw factory 
girl. I had no mother and no home. God knows 
what would have become of me if it hadn't been for 
Miss Dodge." More than five thousand girls have been 
members of these clubs since Miss Dodge started them 
thirty years ago, and every one has been to Miss 
Dodge, not a " club member," but a friend. 

Out of her friendship with many girls there was 
born in Miss Dodge the deep conviction that the 
schools ought to be teaching children how to use their 
hands as well as their heads. Many of her girl friends 
had not known how to do the simplest things about 
a house and had had no chance to learn until her clubs 
opened classes for them. It is hard to realize now, 
when there are great institutions especially for the 
teaching of the industrial arts, when these subjects are 
taught by many public schools, social settlements, 
Christian Associations, and other kindred organiza- 
tions, that twenty-five years ago they were scarcely 
taught at all. Miss Dodge felt that they must be 
taught, and she and eleven other women organized the 
Kitchen Garden Association for the purpose of mak- 
ing people see this need. This Association grew into 
the Industrial Education Association, which opened 
a school for the teaching of such subjects in 1885. A 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 183 

total of 1,904 students entered the school the first year, 
4,383 the second ; and it was not long before the pur- 
pose of the organization had been attained and a recog- 
nition of the value of industrial education secured. 
All the schools wanted industrial arts taught, but 
where were the men and women able to teach them ? 

Miss Dodge was a school commissioner at this time ; 
the first woman who had ever held such a position in 
New York. Through her contact with the teachers she 
learned that many of them were eager for further 
training but saw no way of securing it. The need of 
such training and the fact that the industrial arts could 
not be taught in the schools unless there were men and 
women trained to teach them, convinced her that a 
teachers' training college was needed. To Miss Dodge 
the recognition of a need meant the necessity of meet- 
ing that need, and so Teachers' College came into being. 
One day as Miss Dodge was driving past the splendid 
buildings, full of teachers preparing for bigger, better 
service, she said quietly to a friend who was with her, 
" I dreamed that once." 

But it was not because it was a beautiful dream come 
true, but because it was a great company of her friends, 
that Miss Dodge so loved Teachers' College. Dean 
Russell told its students the other day : " Not a day, 
certainly not a week, has passed since I became one 
of this group that she has not befriended in some ma- 
terial way a Teachers' College student or officer. We 
owe to her our students' emergency fund, which has 
restored to health hundreds of beneficiaries in hospital 



i84 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

or sanitarium. She has been the backer and chief sup- 
porter of our religious and social work, and in a thou- 
sand ways, characteristic of her gentle nature, she 
has guided us to a higher life." 

For eight years Miss Dodge loved young women 
through the Young Women's Christian Association. 
As president of the National Board of the Young 
Women's Christian Association of the United States, 
she poured the richness of her life into the lives of 
city girls and country girls, high school girls, and col- 
lege girls, immigrant girls and Indian girls, colored 
girls and Oriental girls. 

It is literal truth to say that there was no young 
woman anywhere who was beyond the bounds of Miss 
Dodge's interest. She was the friend of every girl 
from the Orient who had come to study in an American 
college. Those of them who lived near her knew well 
what a gracious hostess she was, and those in colleges 
farther away were sure of her Christmas greeting each 
year. They were her last guests; she was not strong 
enough to be with them that afternoon before she 
went away, but twice she sent some one to teli them 
how glad she was that they were there. 

Miss Dodge's friendship for the girls of the world 
made her a most loyal supporter of the World's Stu- 
dent Christian Federation, that great Christian organi- 
zation binding together the students of all countries. 
When the delegates of forty different nations came 
together at Lake Mohonk in 1913, for the biennial 
convention of the Federation, Miss Dodge was their 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 185 

first hostess. Dainty little ladies from Japan, wistful- 
eyed women from Russia, eager-faced girls from 
China, timid folk from Finland in quaint white student 
caps, sturdy North American Indians, vigorous-think- 
ing-and-speaking men and women from Germany, 
Great Britain, Portugal — every land under the sun al- 
most — mingled together on " Greyston's " green lawn 
and felt no more strangers or foreigners, for, though 
some of them could not understand the words their 
hostess spoke, they knew that her eyes and hand-clasp 
had called them friends. It is because Miss Dodge 
cared for all girls that the World's Student Christian 
Federation has been able to send a woman secretary 
to organize women students into Christian movements 
in Russia, Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, 
Italy, and other European countries, and to strengthen 
the work already begun in Europe, Asia, Africa, Aus- 
tralia, and America. 

More than forty years ago far-seeing missionary 
workers started a school for girls in Constantinople, 
for the purpose of giving Christian education to the 
young women of the Near East. As the years went 
on the opportunities of this school grew steadily. Girls 
came to it from every part of the Turkish empire, 
from Persia and Russia and the Balkan states, from 
Albania and the islands of the ^Egean sea, and went 
out from it to be leaders. In 1904 the president of the 
college went to Miss Dodge and told her what this 
college could do in transforming the life of the Near 
East by opening its doors wide to young women, and 



186 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

sending them out from their years of study under vital 
Christian influence to be strong, steady, educated 
leaders. 

Miss Dodge at once responded to this call. She 
accepted membership on an advisory committee in New 
York, later she became a trustee, then vice-president of 
the board of trustees, and later the president of the 
board. The years during which she gave so much of 
her thought and strength and money to Constantinople 
College were perhaps the most critical period in its 
history. The revolution in Turkey occurred during 
this time, in 1908, and partly in consequence of it the 
college grew steadily both in numbers and in in- 
fluence. The new government gave it protection and 
support and sent students to it on government scholar- 
ships; Mohammedans who a few years ago would have 
killed their daughters rather than permit them to go to 
a Christian school have sent their children there in 
large numbers. In 19 14 there were sixty-three Mo- 
hammedan students enrolled. When Miss Dodge first 
came into the board, the college was housed in old and 
inadequate buildings at Scutari; now it is in a beautiful 
new home on the heights of Arneutkey ; then there were 
less than sixty students in the college department, in 
19 1 4 there were one hundred and thirty-eight enrolled 
in college courses and a still larger number in the 
preparatory department. The last railroad journey 
Miss Dodge made was to Boston, to attend a meeting 
of the board of trustees of her beloved Constantinople 
College. 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 187 

The Great Friend of all the world looked into the 
hearts of folks and found that some were weary and 
discouraged, some were crushed and helpless, some 
were lonely and hungry, some were cold and careless, 
some were selfish and sinful, and all were needing a 
friend. Then he looked up into his Father's face and 
said, " For their sakes, I consecrate myself." And she 
who followed in his steps said that to him. All that 
she had, all that she was, she consecrated in his name, 
to those who needed her friendship. 

" Who within our acquaintance so rigidly econo- 
mized and so wisely utilized this great talent?" asks 
one who worked with her. Her days were crowded full 
from early morning until evening, and she limited her 
summer vacations to two weeks. Few women, even 
among her working girl friends, were such hard work- 
ers as Miss Dodge, or had so little time to them- 
selves. " I too am a working girl," she used to say, 
" only I happen to have had my wages paid in advance." 
Those who knew the colossal tasks to which Miss 
Dodge set her hand, and knew too her almost miracu- 
lous thoughtfulness in the " little kindnesses which 
most leave undone or despise " could scarcely believe 
that she could do so much. The need of a world 
for her constrained her, and she could not throw 
away the time in which she might be serving. Yet she 
never seemed hurried. How often her mere presence, 
the contagion of her calmness, her quiet voice quoting, 
" Sit still, my daughter," have brought peace to those 
who were anxious about many things. " Here was 



188 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

one who had no time to waste upon herself," says one 
who watched her life understandingly. " For their 
sakes " she spent her time for others, never for her- 
self; for their sakes she carefully planned ahead the 
expenditure of every hour that each might be used to 
the greatest advantage; for their sakes she was so 
careful in the keeping of appointments that her prompt- 
ness was proverbial and none can remember that she 
was ever even a little late for anything. 

She consecrated her mind to the service of folks; 
that great, clear deep-thinking mind, which Pierpont 
Morgan called " the finest business brain in the United 
States, not excepting that of any man." Miss Dodge 
had wealth, but she might have had far greater wealth 
had she given her thought to business interests. It is 
doubtful, however, whether such an idea ever occurred 
to her; as her whole thought was to serve her friends, 
and she devoted the strength of her mind to their needs 
and problems. For their sakes she kept her mind big 
and free from prejudice. " Her great work," some 
one says, " was not only great because she brought to 
it abundant means and great business energy, but it 
was great because she came to everything with an abso- 
lutely open mind." For their sakes she thought deeply 
and fearlessly and far. It was not enough for her to 
look ahead five years or ten; she took, it has been said, 
" the hundred year view." 

Few people have ever been so careful in the use of 
money as was Miss Dodge. " The wages paid in ad- 
vance " were large, but never large enough to be used 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 189 

for unnecessary luxuries. If Miss Dodge was ever 
extravagant it was not for her own but for her friends' 
pleasure. It did not take her long to decide to give 
many thousands to promote a cause that would benefit 
her friends, but she did not expend even a very small 
sum for something for her own use until careful 
thought had convinced her that it was a real necessity 
to her. And gifts big and little, to a great organiza- 
tion or to a person, went with the simple words " From 
a friend." 

Once a guest from a far-away land of grinding 
poverty and desperate suffering was troubled because 
of the money expended in making Miss Dodge's homes 
in New York and Riverdale the places of beauty and 
comfort that they were. But before she went away 
she had begun to understand, for she had come to see 
something of the way in which Miss Dodge's homes 
were used. Miss Dodge did not count even her own 
home as hers to enjoy, but rather as an instrument 
for the service of her friends; and it was for their 
sakes that she made it restful and radiant. There 
were many large gatherings in both homes, meetings 
and conferences, dinners and luncheons, and week- 
end gatherings innumerable, none of them purposeless, 
but all of them for the sake of helping. It would be 
interesting to have a list of the organizations for the 
service of people which had their birth at 262 Madison 
Avenue, New York City. But Miss Dodge loved best 
of all to use her home to rest and refresh and cheer. 
Lonely folk were sure of a special welcome ; tired folk 



igo COMRADES IN SERVICE 

began to be rested the minute their hostess-friend 
greeted them ; and troubled, struggle-worn folk found 
soothing and strength in the quiet of that House of 
Friendliness. Truly it was " a house by the side of the 
road," but the races of men did not go by ; they turned 
in with their problems and heartaches and needs, and 
their friend saw them all, and from the sincere depths 
of a humble heart thanked them for coming. Few 
people have been so busy ; few have been so absolutely 
accessible at all times. 

" Her visitors," a close friend writes, " were young 
artists seeking engagements, brides who wanted her 
recommendation before opening a household charge 
account, invalids who wanted a change of climate, self- 
supporting women who had lent their savings on poor 
security, heiresses who wanted advice about charitable 
donations, lawyers who were drawing up their clients' 
wills, girls who wanted her to meet their fiances, early 
schoolmates who loved to be in the mere presence of 
this unselfish worker, representatives of ill-conceived 
or immature projects, people with letters, salaried co- 
workers in the different movements who forgot the 
official tie and loved the personal acquaintance." 

And whatever they had come for, all the folk who 
sought her went away gallant-hearted and glad-eyed, 
for to all of them she had given the golden gift of 
her faith in them, a faith which did not simply pas- 
sively believe, but which was actively creative. " More 
than any woman of our generation," one who knew 
her well has said, " she was a builder and maker of 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 191 

human character, and always by the method of faith. 
She agreed with Hocking when he says, ' What I be- 
lieve of my fellow men goes far to determine what my 
fellow men actually are.' " She was a friend of folks, 
and " a friend is one who summons us to our best." 
One of those who knew her best says, " There was 
refuge in her presence. She was certain to under- 
stand." Yes, she was like the shadow of a great rock, 
but she was also like fountains of living water. Liter- 
ally hundreds found not only refuge and rest in her 
presence, but in her splendid faith in them they found 
too a new vigor and a courage all but lost. 

It was a shining thing, that faith of hers, born not of 
lack of knowledge, but of years of experience with 
folks, all kinds of folks, folks who had failed and 
failed and failed again, as well as those who had 
marched gallantly and steadily onward. Often and 
often it was the faith that is veritably the substance of 
things hoped for, but unseen, but it was a faith that 
never wavered, never grew dim, never lost its joyous 
confidence. 

One thing more Miss Dodge gave to each of the 
hundreds of those who called her friend — herself. 
Her correspondence was colossal, but no letter, how- 
ever full of business it might be, ever lacked the warm, 
living throb of a friendly heart. She could not have 
been impersonal. Although writing was very painful, 
because of a form of writer's cramp from which she 
suffered for years, she wrote hundreds of notes by 
hand that she might give herself more completely in 



192 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

them. Those that had to be dictated were always 
personally signed and sent in envelopes addressed by 
her. She was sure to learn of illness, however slight, 
and, if she were too far away to come herself, her 
flowers or a thoughtful note were always there. She 
who ever carried the burden of great organizations 
and great causes in her mind and on her heart always 
had time for the little things which other people were 
too busy to remember. Perhaps none of her relatives 
will miss her quite so much as those older ones who 
for the first time in many years are failing to receive 
the weekly letter which meant more and more to them 
as the years went on. Painful though writing was, 
her service through letters was unceasing. Every 
Monday morning for twenty years the postman stopped 
at the door of a little home where one of her " girls " 
lived, with a friendly message from Miss Dodge. An- 
other one of those girls had had her weekly note for 
thirty years. Several of them treasure warm afghans 
which Miss Dodge somehow found time to crochet for 
them during the full years when an invalid mother 
claimed her thought and care. If Miss Dodge thought 
some one in a meeting which she was attending looked 
exhausted, the tired one found a carriage at the door 
to take her home. Her own automobile was busy dur- 
ing such meetings taking an invalid or a group of little 
children for an outing. Children were such a constant 
joy to her! All the babies in her own family and 
the families of her friends cuddled into her great 
warm heart and found it one of the coziest, sunshini- 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 193 

est nooks in the big new world into which they had 
come. 

Miss Dodge was never too busy to think of folks 
who were strangers and might be lonely. A visitor 
to New York loves to remember what happened on 
her wedding anniversary, which bade fair to be a dis- 
mal day because her husband had unexpectedly been 
prevented from joining her. Somehow Miss Dodge 
learned of this disappointment, and a box of wonder- 
ful roses and carnations and violets straightway car- 
ried a sympathetic message to the forlorn little lady. 
" Oh, she loves me and understands me, and she wishes 
me to know it ; and she has sent me so many flowers 
that I may have the pleasure of giving some of them to 
others," was the little woman's first thought, and she 
almost forgot her disappointment in sharing the flower 
messengers with a young bride who found the strange 
great city a lonely place, with a brave working girl 
making a plucky fight against heavy odds, and a tired 
invalid. 

After all it was the best gift Miss Dodge had to 
give — that of herself, and it was that gift more than 
all the others that won for her the trust of those who 
did not trust easily, and the love of all kinds of peo- 
ple. They all claimed her as their personal friend. 
Some one said to a company of girls the other day, 
'-' I want to call you ' dear girls/ as Miss Dodge would 
have done." But these working girls who had known 
her whispered to each other, " No; she would have 
said ' dear friends.' " It was the joy of knowing Miss 



194 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

Dodge her friend, that sent a little cleaning woman 
to her employer, face ashine, because she had seen a 
letter addressed to her in the hall. " Oh, do you know 
her too ? " she exclaimed, and those two friends of hers 
sat down together and talked of her, the cleaning all 
forgotten. After she had gone two little working girls 
were talking together in a street-car. " We've lost our 
best friend," they said. " She was everybody's friend, 
but she loved girls most. That's why she was so in- 
terested in the Young Women's Christian Association. 
Nobody ever went to her but what they found a 
friend." The one who heard did not need any name 
to tell her of whom they were speaking. Everywhere 
the same thing was being said in many different let- 
ters, from many different lips, — " she was my best 
friend," — the very same words, over and over again. 
Few people have ever given so lavishly of so many 
things as did Miss Dodge; and few have ever been 
so unconscious of the greatness and the value of their 
gifts. She who faced tremendous tasks with magnifi- 
cent courage, often gave very timidly. Invitations to 
her home were offered with diffidence, and the assur- 
rance that they need not be accepted if it would be 
in any way inconvenient. Then, when the guests tried 
after they had gone to write her a little of how much 
the visit had meant, she wrote them to say how much 
she appreciated their kindness in coming. Her grati- 
tude for the acceptance of her wonderful gifts al- 
most wrung the heart, in its unconsciousness of the 
value of what she gave. It was this deep, genuine 



THE STORY OF A FRIEND 195 

humility which made her shrink from any kind of pub- 
licity or acclaim, which made her as some one has said, 
" The most prominent, least known woman in 
America." 

And it is partly because she was so humble that she 
was so great. She felt that she could learn of every 
one. She knew that she needed her friends and what 
they could give her, even as they needed her and what 
she could give them. In the superb strength of her 
womanhood she often turned aside to the hospital 
where one of her factory friends lay for many months, 
seeking her advice and guidance in her work for girls. 
When she took up the presidency of the National 
Board of the Young Women's Christian Association 
she did it very humbly ; but she said that she could not 
have done it at all had it not been for what her girl 
friends had taught her. 

Truly, as one who watched her beautiful pilgrim- 
age with understanding eyes says, Miss Dodge was 
of that company who " in a strong light shrink aside; 
yet walk in a radiance all their own, their faces alight 
with the serenity we call divine, the plainest counte- 
nance among them beautified by inward peace. Of all 
who came into the observer's view none are as fettered 
as these, none as little free to go their own way, to live 
their lives at ease apart. Not if great riches be theirs 
can they roam whereso'er they wish and spend them- 
selves as they please, for their hearts are no longer 
theirs, nor even their hands : the first they have given 
away to all mankind; the second serve others, but 



196 COMRADES IN SERVICE 

them no longer. Theirs are the heaviest chains of 
servitude willingly borne as though the wearers felt 
them not, though deeply they cut into the flesh. By 
them no appeal can go unanswered; their fate is to 
respond, quiveringly, to every note of suffering and of 
need. In their souls has been kindled ' the passionate 
pity for the joyless/ for them the purest visions of 
youth have not faded, nor altered." 1 

" To respond, quiveringly, to every note of suffering 
and of need." A friend of folks will always suffer 
much. Every trouble that came to one of her friends 
meant keen pain to Miss Dodge's great heart. Rainy 
days always hurt her because her girls were out in 
the storm and she could not shield them. The great 
European war broke her heart. From all over the 
world letters and cablegrams came to her bringing 
piteous appeals. She gave to the uttermost, and suf- 
fered agony because she could do no more. One who 
was near her in those days says : " She is the first of 
my personal friends to be killed by the war." It costs 
to be a friend of folks — to folks of all the world. 

But it pays to be a friend of folks — to folks of all 
the world. The world is nearer the heart of the 
Great Friend to-day, because this child of his was will- 
ing to pay the cost, and, holding fast to his hand, look- 
ing up into his eyes, trod the Way of Friendly Hearts 
with unfaltering feet. 

1 Oswald Garrison Villard in the Association Monthly, March, 
1915. 



Mission Study Courses 



"Anywhere, provided it be forward." — David Livingstone. 



Prepared under the direction of the 
MISSIONARY EDUCATION MOVEMENT 

OF THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA 



Educational Committee: G. F. Sutherland, Chairman; A. 
E. Armstrong, J. I. Armstrong, Frank L. Brown, Hugh L. 
Burleson, W. W. Cleland, W. E. Doughty, H. Paul Douglass, 
Arthur R. Gray, R. A. Hutchison, B. Carter Milliken, John 
M. Moore, John H. Poorman, T. Bronson Ray, Jay S. Stowell. 



The Forward Mission Study Courses are an outgrowth of 
a conference of leaders in young people's mission work, held 
in New York City, December, 1901. To meet the need that 
was manifested at that conference for mission study text- 
books suitable for young people, two of the delegates, Pro- 
fessor Amos R. Wells, of the United Society of Christian 
Endeavor, and Mr. S. Earl Taylor, Chairman of the General 
Missionary Committee of the Ep worth League, projected ^ the 
Mission Study Courses. These courses have been officially 
adopted by the Missionary Education Movement, and are now 
under the immediate direction of the Educational Committee 
of the Movement. The books of the Movement are now being 
used by more than forty home and foreign mission boards and 
societies of the United States and Canada. 

The aim is to publish a series of text-books covering the 
various home and foreign mission fields and problems and 
written by leading authorities. 



The following text-books having a sale of over 1,500,000 have 
been published : 

1. The Price of Africa. Biographical. By S. Earl Taylor. 

2. Into All the World. A general survey of missions. By 
Amos R. Wells. 

3. Princely Men in the Heavenly Kingdom. Biographical. 
By Harlan P. Beach. 

4. Sunrise in the Sunrise Kingdom. Revised Edition. A 
study of Japan. By John H. DeForest. 

5. Heroes of the Cross in America. Home Missions. Bio- 
graphical. By Don O. Shelton. 

6. Daybreak in the Dark Continent. Revised Edition. A 
study of Africa. By Wilson S. Naylor. 

7. The Christian Conquest of India. A study of India. 
By James M. Thoburn. 

8. Aliens or Americans? A study of Immigration. By 
Howard B. Grose. 

9. The Uplift of China. Revised Edition. A study of 
China. By Arthur H. Smith. 

10. The Challenge of the City. A study of the City. By 
Josiah Strong. 

11. The Why and How of Foreign Missions. A study of 
the relation of the home Church to the foreign missionary enter- 
prise. By Arthur J. Brown. 

12. The Moslem World. A study of the Mohammedan 
world. By Samuel M. Zwemer. 

13. The Frontier. A study of the New West. By Ward 
Piatt. 

14. South America: Its Missionary Problems. A study of 
South America. By Thomas B. Neely. 

15. The Upward Path : The Evolution of a Race. A study 
of the Negro. By Mary Helm. 

16. Korea in Transition. A study of Korea. By James S. 
Gale. 

17. Advance in the Antilles. A study of Cuba and Porto 
Rico. By Howard B. Grose. 

18. The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions. A study 
of conditions throughout the non-Christian world. By John R. 
Mott. 

19. India Awakening. A study of present conditions in 
India. By Sherwood Eddy. 

20. The Church of the Open Country. A study of the 
problem of the Rural Church. By Warren H. Wilson. 

21. The Call of the World. A survey of conditions at home 
and abroad of challenging interest to men. By W. E. Doughty. 

22. The Emergency in China. A study of present-day con- 
ditions in China. By F. L. Hawks Pott. 

23. Mexico To-day: Social, Political, and Religious Con- 
ditions. A study of present-day conditions in Mexico. By 
George B. Winton. 



24- Immigrant Forces. A study of the immigrant in his 
home and American environment. By William P. Shriver. 

25. The New Era in Asia. Contrast of early and present 
conditions in the Orient. By Sherwood Eddy. 

26. The Social Aspects of Foreign Missions. A study of 
the social achievements of foreign missions. By W. H. P. 
Faunce. 

27. The New Home Missions. A study of the social achieve- 
ments and social program of home missions. By H. Paul 
Douglass. 

28. The American Indian on the New Trail. A story of 
the Red Men of the United States and the Christian gospel. By 
Thomas C. Moffett. 

29. The Individual and the Social Gospel. A study of the 
individual in the local church and his relation to the social mes- 
sage of the gospel. By Shailer Mathews. 

30. Rising Churches in Non-Christian Lands. A study of 
the native Church and its development in the foreign mission 
field. By Arthur J. Brown. 

31. The Churches at Work. A statement of the work of the 
churches in the local community in the United States. By 
Charles L. White. 

32. Efficiency Points. The Bible, Service, Giving, Prayer, 
— four conditions of efficiency. By W. E. Doughty. 

In addition to the above courses, the following have been pub- 
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1. Uganda's White Man of Work. The story of Alexander 
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2. Servants of the King. A series of eleven sketches of 
famous home and foreign missionaries. By Robert E. Speer. 

3. Under Marching Orders. The story of Mary Porter 
Gamewell of China. By Ethel Daniels Hubbard. 

4. Winning the Oregon Country. The story of Marcus 
Whitman and Jason Lee in the Oregon country. By John T. 
Faris. 

5. The Black Bearded Barbarian. The story of George 
Leslie Mackay of Formosa. By Marian Keith. . - 

6. Livingstone the Pathfinder. The story of David Living- 
stone. By Basil Mathews. 

7. Ann of Ava. The story of Ann Hasseltine Judson ot 
Burma. By Ethel Daniels Hubbard. ■ . 

8. Comrades in Service. Eleven brief biographies of Chris- 
tian workers. By Margaret E. Burton. 

These books are published by mutual arrangement among the 
home and foreign mission boards, to whom all orders should be 
addressed. They are bound uniformly and are sold at 60 cents 
in cloth, and 40 cents in paper; prepaid. Nos. 21, 29, and 32 
are 25 cents in cloth, prepaid. 



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